Food production, farmers, rural society, and ecological farming practices.
Foodthink is a community dedicated to knowledge, information and writing on sustainable food and agriculture, co-founded and managed by a group of long-standing practitioners and researchers in the field. Since our launch in August 2017, we have connected with nearly 200 outstanding researchers and practitioners across China and internationally. Together,…
In 2021, after a decade of drifting in Beijing, I returned to my hometown of Shenxian County in Shandong due to my mental and physical health. I stayed there for nearly a year. Shenxian is often called “China’s premier vegetable county”, with fruit and vegetable cultivation covering more than a…
In late June, while travelling by car to Jiangbutasi village in eastern Altay, Xinjiang, we kept coming across Kazakh herders on horseback driving their livestock to summer pastures. Vehicles frequently had to pull over to let the herds pass. This is now the migration season for herders. Herders in the…
Last year, Foodthink published an article 《Taking an Internet Celebrity Home to Sell Navel Oranges: Only Then Did We Realise How Tough Life Is for Fruit Farmers》. In it, Fengche, who works in Guangzhou, shares her story of returning to her hometown to help sell oranges for her family, which…
Which are the finest lychee-growing regions in Guangdong? Zhong Ge and Guo Rui, villagers from Yinlin in Conghua, answered in unison: Conghua would undoubtedly rank among the best. They maintain that a lychee’s quality depends not merely on latitude, but also on local microclimates. Conghua’s crop has long been celebrated…
Recently, reports of Henan’s ‘rotting-field rain’ and the frantic rush to harvest wheat have swept across social media, striking a chord with everyone who follows agriculture. The Guanzhong region of Shaanxi, another major wheat-growing area, endured the same downpours almost simultaneously with Henan, and the outlook for its wheat crops…
Earlier this year, four years after moving to the Netherlands, my partner and I finally rented a hectare of land in Utrecht province, and I began working on my farm. Before I decided to set up a farm, I completed placements at several small organic farms in the Netherlands. During…
Nestled among the trendy restaurants and cafés on the bustling Phoenix Hui retail street along Beijing’s Eastern Third Ring Road is a greengrocer named “Jishi”. If you’ve ever walked past it, you might have been drawn in by its unpretentious shop window and displays. In this episode, we take you…
Revitalising local industries is the top priority of rural revitalisation and the starting point for practical work. Rural areas without industries struggle to attract people, let alone retain talent; pathways for increasing farmers’ income remain narrow, and cultural activities are hard to organise. As localities promote industrial revitalisation, they must…
Effective from 11 May this year, a revised national food safety standard officially came into force. The maximum residue limit for procymidone in chives has been raised from 0.2 mg/kg to 5 mg/kg – a twenty-fourfold relaxation. Although prochloraz is classified as a low-toxicity pesticide, long-term ingestion may still pose…
