Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
I. My Story with Fireflies As someone from the north, I had never seen a firefly before the age of fifty; my limited understanding of them stopped at the classical idiom ‘studying by the light of snow and a pouch of fireflies’. It was only when I travelled to Taiwan…
On 12 April, a week after Grain Rain, eastern Sichuan had seen several consecutive showers, easing a drought that had persisted since the Spring Festival. Rice seedlings in the fields were now nearing transplanting season. That afternoon, senior agronomist Yuan Yong and a colleague travelled from Jianyang City to Zaizi…
I. Who Truly Cares About the Snow Leopard? Pema Tseden’s posthumous film *Snow Leopard*, winner of Best Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, tells a remarkably straightforward tale: on the high, snow-swept plateau, a herding family loses nine sheep after a snow leopard attacks their livestock pen. This incident…
I was born in a small mountain village in Hunan where tea was grown. Growing up amongst the tea gardens and surrounding woods gave me a particular fascination with the tea industry. When I was a child, tea production in the village lacked a systematic approach. Every household treated it…
Foodthink Says Now that the Grain Rain solar term has passed, the peak season for this year’s spring tea harvest draws to a close. During the Qingming Festival holiday, Foodthink shared a story about the climate resilience of a natural farming tea garden in Xinyang. We are now publishing the…
Foodthink says Since returning home in 2013 to establish Chengdu’s Liangliang Farm, Tang Liang’s work has been a constant source of inspiration for those concerned with food and farming. In 2018, his The Ledger and Lifestyle of a Family Farm offered a candid answer to the question, “How does one…
Foodthink Says “Tea plucked before Qingming is worth its weight in gold.” Spring teas harvested and processed ahead of the Qingming Festival often command premium prices, representing the most crucial annual yield for many growers. Should extreme weather trigger a shortfall, the notoriously brief harvesting and market window for this…
On a windy March day in Beijing, we sat down with Tang Liang, who had travelled all the way from Liangliang Farm in Sichuan, to reflect on his twelve-year journey back to the countryside at the Foodthink offices. Tang was the first in his family to attend university. After graduating…
One of the most significant stories from Europe recently has been the wave of farmers taking to the streets across the continent to protest EU trade and land management policies, with France serving as the epicentre of the demonstrations. According to leaders of the major French farming unions spearheading the…
As 2024 began, farmer protests swept across Europe, spreading like wildfire from Germany. At the peak of the demonstrations in mid-January, over 30,000 farmers drove more than 5,000 tractors from across Germany to protest in Berlin. The direct trigger for these protests was the German government’s announcement at the end…
