Digital technology, agricultural technology, AI, and biotechnology applications in food and farming.
Sili partners with agricultural technology stations and social organisations across Yunnan to promote ridging-and-furrowing low-water rice cultivation. From Yilong Lake’s shores to the Hani Rice Terraces, the same approach has grown into different forms, shaped by differences in subsidies, water conditions and varieties.
In 1953, Swanson & Sons launched the “TV Dinner” – modelled on the aluminium foil trays served on planes – to deal with unsold Thanksgiving turkeys, bringing frozen pre-prepared food into American homes.
A former agriculture reporter covered feed market prices and live hog shipments for two and a half years – yet stories mostly came from listed companies’ earnings, and food was always just figures. Renting a plot, chasing abscessed pork: neither closed the gap between commercial framing and the field.
Foodthink marks Qingming by building a “cemetery” for five articles deleted from its WeChat Official Account — detailing, one by one, why and when each vanished, from a Bianlifeng algorithm battle to a farmer’s plastic mulch film dispute — and leaving keywords to help readers find the originals.
Ren Yingying of Lianxiang Farm was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to the GFFA in Berlin. The position paper she co-drafted demands breaking multinational corporations’ control over seeds, land and supply chains, promoting agroecology, and safeguarding smallholder farmers’ land and policy-participation rights.
Maize once needed just one round of pesticide; now each crop demands six. The Fall armyworm has pushed farmers onto a “pesticide treadmill”, biological control is too slow, and whether GM maize can break the deadlock remains uncertain.
Blackchin tilapia entered Thai waterways via CP Foods’ experimental fish farm in 2010, spreading to 19 provinces over more than a decade. 1,400 fishers have formally filed a lawsuit demanding the responsible party be identified and 2.486 billion baht in compensation.
In 2024, riders’ sudden deaths, the exposé of “ghost takeaway”, collective protests, two new books and two films pushed the plight of workers under delivery-platform algorithms into public discourse. Foodthink reviews the year’s key stories and films about platforms and food.
From the labour order of delivery riders to the insights into symbiosis offered by mycelial networks, more than ten new books published in 2024 across food, agriculture and ecology record the hope intertwined with contradictions between people, land and nature.
For four decades, Benedikt Haerlin – Head of the Berlin office of the Future Agriculture Foundation – has been deeply involved in the anti-GM agenda, from driving the EU’s first GM Directive to launching a global advocacy campaign, covering key milestones such as mandatory labelling, Golden Rice and CRISPR/Cas9.
