Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
Beijing-born Liu Yang, from IT, fell for cheese while studying in France. From a small Huilongguan Farmers’ Market stall in 2009, he crafted over a dozen handmade cheeses blending French tradition with Beijing’s terroir, yet Bule Cheese Workshop faces the growth challenge of “from workshop to factory”.
A former business journalist interned two months at Zhiliangtian Farm in Alxa: eight years of organic melon growing yet no stable sales channel, live-stream audiences barely hit a hundred, per-box logistics nears 20 yuan, and the farm owner himself admits the flagship product still runs at a loss.
From a Berlin hydroponic workshop to the successive closures or bankruptcies of infarm, AeroFarms and others, vertical farming’s fundamental flaws in crop variety and energy consumption are impossible to ignore. Industrial designer A Liang also charts a path for low-tech hydroponics back to communities.
Typhoon Doksuri tracked north. In Yingchengzi Village, Wuchang, Third Grandpa’s two hectares of river-bend land suffered total crop failure, leaving the whole family sixty or seventy thousand yuan in the red. The insurance payout was long overdue, and end-of-September gales caused further lodging, forcing harvest by hand.
The “cabbage-priced” fish, once ¥0.1 a jin, was knocked nearly to extinction by the qiaogu method. Ningde now farms 96% of China’s large yellow croaker, where farmers take four years to raise a single “semi-wild” croaker.
From two projects to over 400, exceeding 40 GW, China’s decade-plus agrivoltaics boom has been driven by surplus PV manufacturing capacity, not agricultural demand. Most sites see farmland abandonment or low yields under panels; arable land is occupied and farmers receive only land rent.
Smallholders — over 98% of agricultural business entities — and a wholesale network that blends produce at every level render the “Compliance Commitment Certificate” incapable of full testing or traceability. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ new measures are unlikely to curb pesticide residues in the vegetable basket.
Two generations of Holzers have rebuilt terrace ponds on the arid slopes of the Central Alps, meeting the harsh climate with 72 interconnected ponds and small year-on-year experiments, grounding ecological diversity in economic calculation rather than moralistic rhetoric.
At a Fermentation Awakening Festival panel in Beijing, Lake Shore Culture’s Jing Yan and Liu Xinxing and Mary, authors of The Incredible Fermentation & Brewing, discussed traditional crafts—Highland barley wine, Sulima wine and others—vanishing as makers dwindle. Fermentation culture still lacks dissemination and consumer support.
Under poverty-alleviation subsidies, farmers in Gong County (pseudonym) grow greenhouse vegetables—yet find no rest all year round, missing even Hakka ancestral hall gatherings. White lotus, despite lower returns, lets the whole family—old and young—each find their place.
