Species protection, ecosystem change, and habitat loss.
In April 2023, nearly a hundred farmers, scientists and grassroots agricultural bureau staff gathered in Suzhou for the Farmer Seed Network’s 10th annual conference to discuss living conservation of farmer varieties, market use and ecological seed certification, and to exchange seeds at a Kunshan organic farm.
Since returning home in 2011, Yu Jiangang has resumed ecological cultivation of Hangzhou white chrysanthemum in Zhenghebang, Tongxiang. Six years of typhoons, extreme heat and a partner’s total crop failure have left only this one mu still farmed by a villager.
Ma Yanwei, a Beijing Normal University ecology master’s graduate, has grown muskmelons in the Tengger Desert for eight years. Lei Tiantian, who left Shanghai, interned on the farm. The three chat under a tree in Alxa about drought, running the farm, and how one melon improves the desert.
Between Yangcheng Lake and Kuilei Lake, Kunshan’s Yuefeng Island Farm manages 101 rice and 113 dryland farm varieties through zoned trials and growth-stage records. Extreme weather prevented 25 varieties from producing saved seed; the farm is now turning old seeds into table products to sustain conservation.
Lei Tiantian, who fled Shanghai to intern at Zhiliangtian Farm, chats with founder Ma Yanwei in the Tengger Desert: growing pumpkins, picking shacong (sand leek)—what kind of life do this generation of ‘new farmers’ actually lead?
Extreme heat has left strawberries all leaf and celery tough and stringy; continuous rain has flooded Pingren Farm three or four times. At Changping and Lingqiu, farmers sow grass to stabilise slopes, raise natural enemies in polytunnels, and apply biofertiliser after flooding — adapting to increasingly unpredictable weather.
