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.
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.
Li Ruijun, a wild-mushroom researcher, was poisoned by overeating broom blossoms last year. Even the termite mushroom, long thought to grow only on termite nests, has been trialled for cultivation — four people in ecology and natural history chat about the safety, authenticity and nature education of foraged food.
Marking the International Day for Biological Diversity, Foodthink invited four guests – including writer Ban Xia and ecologist Sun Shan – for a dialogue. At Kunming’s Zhuanxin Farmers’ Market, one stall carries 106 varieties of foraged wild greens; matsutake, however, has been listed as endangered.
Drawing on years of reporting, Foodthink shows how China’s small-scale ecological farmers grow healthy produce without relying on chemical inputs — from pest and disease management and soil management to permaculture and other farming systems — and previews the agricultural training courses set to launch in 2024.
The “cabbage-priced” fish, once ¥0.1 a jin, was knocked nearly to extinction by the qiaogu method. Ningde now farms 96% of China’s large yellow croaker, where farmers take four years to raise a single “semi-wild” croaker.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Forest and Farm Facility surveyed over 1,800 smallholder farmers across 13 countries and found that their own climate adaptation spending far exceeds international climate finance. Farmer organisations are calling on COP28 to fund grassroots cooperatives directly.
Two generations of Holzers have rebuilt terrace ponds on the arid slopes of the Central Alps, meeting the harsh climate with 72 interconnected ponds and small year-on-year experiments, grounding ecological diversity in economic calculation rather than moralistic rhetoric.
Since its 1991 discovery in Beijing, Italian cocklebur has spread to Liaoning, Hebei and beyond; 8% coverage can cut yields by 60%. Yue Xiaoxiao at the Beijing Xuanwu Youth Science and Technology Museum leads schoolchildren in a distribution and damage survey, inviting farmers to fill in a questionnaire.
Brother Ma in Damao Banner watches his sheep and cattle trapped in livestock sheds on fodder, while Dulan’s grassland in East Ujimqin Banner degrades to bare ground. Sedentary pastoralism and dried-up water sources have planted the roots of dust beneath their feet.