Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Two interns set off from Guixinyuan Farm, visiting five ecological farms across Guangdong and Guangxi, repeatedly recalibrating between the ease of Natural Farming and the pressures of yields, lease terms and labour – ultimately affirming the ideal of a Half-farming, Half-X life.
Farmer Kouzi conflated the Yellow Gourd Beetle with fireflies because its common name contains “Ying”, and in fury kicked a drifting firefly—only afterwards learning that “Ying” (lustrous) and “Ying” (firefly) are entirely unrelated.
In Zhaizi Village, Jianyang, Sichuan, Senior Agronomist Yuan Yong teaches smallholders the no-till cover method for growing rice hands-on. A few aunties and uncles sit round discussing whether it suits their plots; Grandpa Jiang decides on the spot to set aside two fen of land to try it.
Li Pengyue, running an ecological fruit orchard in Weihai, cannot protect her vegetable seedlings without pesticide, mirroring the plight of Jinpa, who holds the snow leopard captive over nine dead sheep in “Snow Leopard”. The only difference: one passively endures; the other actively cedes.
In a tea-growing village in the Hunan–Hubei borderlands, after a leading tea enterprise entered under the “company + farming household” model, all-round producers — from growing and picking to pan-firing and selling — were reduced to “partial tea farmers”, with value-added stages like tea-making and branding monopolised by the firm.
Deyi Tea Garden’s Zhang Chao counters the squeeze the pure bud-tip standard places on tea farmers through “multi-purpose use and flexible production”: the same mountain-site material shifts between green, black and white tea with weather and seasons, extending the picking window from twenty days to sixty.
In Niujiao Village, Jintang County, Chengdu, Tang Liang spent three years reuniting a migrant-work-scattered family, then ran a family farm. At a Foodthink sharing session, he reflects on ten-odd years, from emotional ties to heat-hit yields, asking whether smallholder families can rejoin livelihood with life’s meaning under urbanisation.
In 2023, a prolonged drought delayed the first pick of Xinyang’s spring tea. Zhang Chao of Deyi Tea Garden in Shihe District, who has practised natural farming for ten years, opened his garden just one day later than the previous year.
Department of Biological Sciences, Southwest University graduate, former white-collar worker, Tang Liang returned to Jintang County, Chengdu, in 2013, sustaining eleven on 30 mu. Per-capita monthly income barely reaches ¥2,000, yet each family member has found their place; the village gained free courses and benches for the elderly.
Farmer Pierre inherited more than twenty cows from his parents. When one shows BSE symptoms, he must choose between culling the whole herd or concealing the medical history — a dilemma that echoes French farmers now taking to the streets against EU policies.
