Environmental pressures, climate change, biodiversity, species protection, and pollution.
Foodthink and Beiye Books’ online book-club on Vanishing Foods: from the Ark of Taste, with 6,592 endangered varieties, and Norway’s Doomsday Vault, to Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei farmer Liu Yurong letting a Little White common bean idle for eight or nine years take root again in the Taihang Mountains.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
A post-90s couple, An Tian and San Qi, returned to Zhaixia Village, Longyan, Fujian, to grow passion fruit. Surrounding terraced fields were stained a withered yellow by the villagers’ herbicide, yet little by little they turned textbook Natural Farming into a way of getting along with this land.
Amid Beijing’s torrential rains and heatwaves this summer, Meituan, Ele.me and JD riders had feet soaked raw, suffered heat stroke and rear-end collisions – yet attendance bonus and late-delivery penalties still forced them to run orders in the rain.
At Mondeggi commons, over 450 members collectively farm 1,800 mu of land and deliberate democratically; Genuino Clandestino uses independent certification to bypass official procedures. These communities extend agroecology from a cultivation technique into collective action fighting for land and food sovereignty.
Pu’er’s coffee farmers, tossed by global prices for over a decade — felling trees for tea, then scrambling back — now see record highs. Yet the surge stems from Brazil’s cuts, extreme weather still disrupts flowering, and they are turning to value-added processing and ecological cultivation for a steadier path.
Home Action director Hu Xiaoping on how Sichuan’s project villages have responded to extreme heat — from recovering heirloom varieties to cutting growing costs — and how climate change forces them to rethink what agriculture means for their lives.
The charity Home Action promotes ecological rice cultivation across Sichuan villages — no-till mulching, no chemical fertiliser, no pesticide — so farmers who have stayed behind can grow food well amid successive droughts and heatwaves without external inputs.
Zhang Kai of Fenye Brewing and Xu Xin of Mars Elephant Lab use a single grain to bridge brewing and baking—from spent-grain biscuits to an Earth Day beer brewed from leftover bread from ten Beijing bakeries—reflecting the practical challenges of the local grain supply chain.
Ecological farm owners in Shunyi, Changping and Baoding have endured year after year of torrential rain flooding their fields, making difficult adjustments from digging drainage trenches to switching crops, yet remain trapped by the absence of public drainage and ever-mounting costs.
