Women practitioners and women’s roles and experiences in agriculture and rural communities.
Last year, standing by a field edge in Yunnan’s hills, I saw rice for the first time sprouting directly from level soil, with no flooded paddies or irrigation ditches in sight. For many, rice is inextricably linked to flooded paddies. Yet it can just as easily be cultivated on dry,…
Foodthink Says In 1948, the central government decided to import tractors from the Soviet Union to bring the vast, untamed lands of Beidahuang under cultivation. At the same time, to train agricultural machinery operators, a tractor driver training programme was launched at the Beian Reclamation Area in Heilongjiang. Eighteen-year-old Liang…
Foodthink Notes Zha Shiyire, born in 1990, is a member of the Huayao Yi ethnic minority from Shiping County, Yunnan, and truly embodies the description of a “girl who grew up in a mountain village”. After graduating from college, she worked at a television station. She resigned in 2019 to…
The film *Nei Sha* opens with an immediate explanation of its title. On the banks of a reed bed in winter, Teacher Tang, an organic farmer, explains to a visiting professor: this is the mouth of the Yangtze River, where shifting sands have deposited over time to gradually form islands.…
Editor’s Note I was introduced to Jiang Ziqi at a book fair in Hangzhou in 2023, when she invited the Farmer Seed Network to share our work on seed saving. Back then, I learned that she and a few companions in Hangzhou were cultivating their own small vegetable plots and…
Editor’s Note In Chengdu’s Yulin community, a surprise vegetable parcel from farming friend Hu Xuemei brought a little shock—and an unexpected shift—to Xia Lili, the cook at the Little Dining Table. This is the fourth piece in the “One Pot Shitai’s Little Dining Table” series. It will explore Xia Lili’s…
Towards the end of 2021, while still working for an internet company in Shanghai, I came across a recruitment notice from Foodthink for their Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme. It was as though something had struck a chord within me. Once my application was accepted, I selected Yuanjian Farm in Meishan,…
