Labor in food and farming systems, migrant workers, labor rights, and changes in production-side work.
As the scattered village in the New Territories crumbled under demolition, Sanjiao carried a sourdough starter through pandemic streets and bread workshops, finally reaching Yinlin Ecological Farm, Conghua, where ecological smallholder flour gives bread back to the land beneath her feet and the community around her.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Forest and Farm Facility surveyed over 1,800 smallholder farmers across 13 countries and found that their own climate adaptation spending far exceeds international climate finance. Farmer organisations are calling on COP28 to fund grassroots cooperatives directly.
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.
Despite 20,000–30,000 yuan per mu from greenhouses, Gong County farmers still grow rice and lotus—paddy fields have been taken over by linked greenhouses, costs become unsustainable once subsidies end, and skills and hiring demands do not suit the pace of the elderly left behind.
At Sister Yanping’s Baicao Garden in Guigang, Guangxi, from handling courier after-sales past midnight and hauling waste with a carrying pole each day, to spending three to five years rebuilding soil ravaged by agrochemicals, Natural Farming is far from the effortless “relying on heaven’s bounty.”
In 2015, a couple born in the 1990s – Yingying and Zhiqiang – returned to their hometown of Pingquan, Chengde, Hebei, and set up Lianxiang Farm. Over eight years, they have grappled time and again with pests, weeds, extreme heat and hiring difficulties – yet they persevere.
In 2011, Yu Jiangang resigned in Beijing and returned to Zhenghebang, Jiaxing. Tracing nearly a century of change in Kaixiangong Village, from silk rural reconstruction to factory-style rearing, he chose to sustain the vanishing silkworm-rearing tradition through his family’s handcrafted silk duvets.
Pollinating and bagging a 300-mu pear orchard, coordinating older workers to follow the farming calendar, hitting the markets to sell the new early-maturing pear variety – after two years growing pears, there is only one conclusion: farming is truly hard, capital on your side or not.
Mr Yuan Qinghua, director of Letian Haiwan Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai, is handy at everything from repairing vehicles and sawing timber to growing vegetables and answering questions. After months interning there, Xiao Mi saw that an ecological farm needs polymaths, not city-style specialists.
Tomato shortages and purchase limits gripped British supermarkets in early 2023. Decades of fixed low-price contracts had forced growers to cut production and offloaded costs onto migrant labour — while corner shops squeezed out by supermarkets became the only place left to buy vegetables in a crisis.
