Extreme weather, agricultural carbon emissions, adaptation, and mitigation strategies.
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.
Supported by Friends of Nature’s Linglong Programme and Foodthink, the team visited 30 ecological smallholder farmers across five provinces and municipalities, recording their practices for responding to extreme weather and the external barriers—funding, insurance—they face, filling a research gap on Chinese smallholder farmers’ active climate adaptation.
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.
Jeremy Clarkson ploughs with a Lamborghini tractor, herds sheep with drones, yet his annual net profit is just £144 – do the same pitfalls await farming in China? And how does the UK’s social support for agriculture compare with Chinese farmers’ circumstances?
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.
Through nearly 100 articles, 13 podcast episodes and more than 40 events, Foodthink recorded ordinary people’s food struggles during the pandemic and ecological smallholders’ climate adaptation practices, and sent its first cohort of young interns to 12 farms – leaving solid traces amid uncertainty.
