Recruitment, programme records, participant stories, and reviews from the Agroecology Internship.
Foodthink, in partnership with Junqiao Crazy Farm, is hosting a three-day co-learning camp in Chongzhou, Chengdu. Led by Luo Lishuang and Huang Guoliang, the curriculum centres on three themes – soil, plants, and animals – paired with hands-on field practice such as composting and fermented plant extract.
Foodthink’s fourth co-learning camp, in October at Junqiao Crazy Farm, Chongzhou, is led by Luo Lishuang and Huang Guoliang—over 20 years in ecological cultivation. Starting from carbon source supplementation, it explores soil-crop relationships. 20 places for ecological smallholder farmers from Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan and Chongqing.
Through Foodthink’s internship programme, a young person came from Shanghai to Wang Jinzhuang, She County, Hebei — spending a month in a Taihang Mountains stone village, from coarse-grain meals to the seed bank, touching the daily rhythms and human warmth of an ancient dryland terraced village.
A month of hoeing, carrying water, huddling by the fire through downpours to mountain folk songs at Baicao Garden — Sister Yan Ping’s ecological farm, Guigang, Guangxi — metres from a chemical-fertiliser orchard. The body into the land’s rhythm, until April’s heat sent a nature-hungry graduate back to the city.
Foodthink has openings for content compilation, research assistant, and short video editing roles, focused on food and agriculture, environment, and public policy topics. Office-based positions are in Haidian, Beijing; part-time roles are remote.
Foodthink’s three-day co-learning camp (4–6 June, Yangqiao Village, Lianhua County, Pingxiang, Jiangxi), featuring two technical advisors with over twenty years in ecological agriculture, threads soil, plants and animals as theoretical lines through hands-on composting and liquid fertiliser, plus market discussion, for 20 small- and medium-scale ecological farmers.
Can’t do without food delivery, can’t put down the “digital side dish”, going to the market less and less, yet starting to try fermentation — young working people’s predicaments and little tips for eating well, gathered by Foodthink over two years of open calls.
Foodthink ends two weeks of silence as Grain Rain arrives, reintroducing itself to readers: a food and agriculture platform founded in 2017, focused on smallholder livelihoods and the conditions of food and farming workers. This year it turns its focus to women farmers, herders and climate resilience.
Extreme weather upends farmers’ planting rhythms, the food-delivery wars compress a meal into a 30-minute order, and imported meat reaches the highland pastoral areas directly – Foodthink’s 2025 field records hold on to the traces of the land and its labourers.
In a sixteenth-century manor in western France, a 1970s hippie couple sustains self-sufficiency through work-exchange volunteers. A month with a Colombian brother and sister—undocumented workers—picking strawberries, smashing walls, making cheese: the “return to the countryside” romantic imaginings shattered by day after day of unpaid manual labour.
