Environmental pressures, climate change, biodiversity, species protection, and pollution.
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.
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.
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.
From the Green Revolution to carbon credits, Bayer and IRRI’s schemes have consistently placed hidden costs on smallholders. Yet farmer networks such as MASIPAG in the Philippines and DDS in India are rebuilding a different emissions-reduction foundation through local varieties and agroecology.
Gannan navel orange output nearly doubled year on year, yet purchase prices plunged from nearly 3 yuan per jin to under 1 yuan. A cold snap forced fruit farmers into a rushed harvest with no sales channels in place, and merchants who had booked orchards broke their contracts.
Typhoon Doksuri tracked north. In Yingchengzi Village, Wuchang, Third Grandpa’s two hectares of river-bend land suffered total crop failure, leaving the whole family sixty or seventy thousand yuan in the red. The insurance payout was long overdue, and end-of-September gales caused further lodging, forcing harvest by hand.
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.
