Food production, farmers, rural society, and ecological farming practices.
During the Spring Festival at the start of 2025, the topic of our family dinner was AI, specifically DeepSeek, which had just blown up. The younger generation couldn’t stop talking about it. I felt a bit detached, much as I had when ChatGPT first launched a couple of years prior.…
What happens when a “expert” with twenty years’ experience researching agricultural policy decides to roll up their trousers and personally cultivate 2.6 mu (roughly 0.42 acres) of paddy rice? Chen Jingjing, an agriculture university graduate with a long-standing focus on rural development, took what he calls an “unconventional” step this…
Foodthink Says On 12 January, based on research conducted across several regions, Foodthink published an original article 《What’s Driving Down the Standards of “High-Standard Farmland”?》, which attracted comments from practitioners and researchers across the agriculture and engineering sectors nationwide. They shared their observations on the construction and operation of high-standard…
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer from Meishan, watched the village’s rice paddies go unharvested, shaking his head in dismay. Yet these fields no longer belonged to him, nor to the villagers, but to the “bosses”—large-scale land contractors from out of town who had acquired the plots through land…
I. Nine Years: Change and Continuity On 5 January 2026, upon reading a report in the Farmers Daily titled “Hebei’s Rural Heating Crisis Must Not Be Delayed Further”, I felt a sudden jolt, as if abruptly transported back nine years. I am from Hebei. 2016 was the first freezing winter…
Foodthink Says Milk, often heralded as a symbol of purity and nature, is in fact highly conducive to microbial growth. Its propensity to spoil and deteriorate quickly meant it was originally ill-suited for long-term storage or long-distance transport. Initially, milk was indeed merely a localised food, yet within today’s modern…
Today, many are beginning to seriously consider the value and meaning of rural life, even weaving farm labour and living into their future plans. In an age marked by risk and uncertainty, Foodthink hopes to support young people who care about food and agriculture—particularly those eager to pursue ecological farming—in…
Looking back at 2025, it opened as a year of loss, as we said goodbye to my mother. Returning to the “Valley of the Wicked”, I welcomed a succession of harvests. From spring onwards, I gathered rapeseed—twenty to twenty-five kilos—yielding more oil than I could possibly use in a year.…
This is Foodthink’s final post of 2025. Surprise—no year-end roundup! (The honest truth? It hasn’t been dug out of the drafts yet, so please dial again later…) Why not take a look at the fun we got up to at the recent Guangdong Harvest Festival! Co-Creating Climate Sci-Fi Thanks to…
Foodthink Says At the start of the 21st century, small family farms were the primary producers of raw milk in China. Today, however, the sector is dominated by large-scale operations housing herds of over 1,000 cows. An earlier article on this channel, Small Family Farms vs. Large Ranches: Whose Milk…
