Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Longtime Foodthink readers will likely already know the name ‘Grandma Kouzi’. Since 2021, this woman nearing sixty has chosen to relocate to ‘Evil Valley’ in Fujian, building her own home, tending the crops herself, carving out a sanctuary from barren land, and exploring a self-sufficient way of life. In this…
Grandpa was the fourth child in his family. Born in 1933, he lost his mother in early childhood and his father in his youth, weathering famine and disaster. He was always a farmer, though he also worked at one stage as a cotton carder. In his final years, he dreamed…
I. The fruit buyers didn’t come this year On 13 December 2023, in Huichang County, Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province – the heartland of Gannan navel oranges – Liao Hai, a farmer born in the 1990s, and his mother, Auntie Zou, were getting ready to start the harvest. Early that morning,…
A Note from Foodthink In early August this year, Wuchang in Heilongjiang province was struck by rare torrential rain and severe flooding, submerging around 40 per cent of its 2.5 million mu of farmland. Two months on from the floods, live-streaming hosts were already pushing Wuchang rice on e-commerce platforms.…
It’s been over two years since I moved to Evil Man Valley, and the annual costs for field labour and organic compost add up to no small sum. The local helpers I bring in often can’t resist working out the figures for me, pointing out that growing things this way…
Thriving industries form a vital foundation for rural revitalisation. Perhaps inspired by Shouguang in Shandong, the primary focus for agricultural development in rural areas across central and western China has often been the promotion of greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Gong County (a pseudonym) in the central region exemplifies this trend. A…
Leaving from Beijing Chaoyang Station, we took a little over an hour on the high-speed rail to Pingquan North Station in Chengde, Hebei Province. Yingying Ren, the matriarch of Lianxiang Farm, was already waiting for us outside the station. Yingying is petite, with her hair swept back in a neat,…
As noted in the first instalment of the *Woren Valley Food Philosophy* series, a single pot of soup for White Dew calls for ten ingredients, nine of which are homegrown. I champion “self-sufficiency” as the ideal for valley life. On paper, our self-sufficiency rate appears to sit at a lofty…
Early autumn finally brought Evil Man Valley its first entirely self-reliant harvest since the community began. The emphasis on “self-reliant” is deliberate: it means handling every detail personally, from transplanting the seedlings to cutting the crop, managing the entire process single-handedly. I moved into Evil Man Valley in June…
Departing Xizhimen and passing through Nankou, the high-speed train crosses the high peaks of the Yanshan Mountains before reaching the Huailai Basin. Though less than an hour from Beijing, the landscape is entirely different: wide, flat plains, sprawling cornfields and vineyards, dotted with the massive towers of wind turbines. The…
