Recruitment, programme records, participant stories, and reviews from the Agroecology Internship.
Foodthink’s second Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme has connected 21 young people — journalists, programmers, chefs, and university students — with nine ecological farms across the country, where they are rediscovering food and the land through turning soil, raising seedlings, and composting.
More than ten young people in Foodthink’s 2023 cohort in the Ecological Agriculture Placement Programme have given their answers: some to reclaim the childhood taste of vegetables, some to master growing knowledge at the front line, some to understand agriculture and the land anew through their bodies.
Ma Yanwei, a Beijing Normal University ecology master’s graduate, has grown muskmelons in the Tengger Desert for eight years. Lei Tiantian, who left Shanghai, interned on the farm. The three chat under a tree in Alxa about drought, running the farm, and how one melon improves the desert.
Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme drew nearly a hundred applications. over ten young people with no agricultural background, including Chaoyan, Guojing and Mubai shared why they left IT, finance, academia, catering or pharmaceuticals to learn to farm in the countryside. Fifteen are about to start their farm internships.
Four interns from Foodthink’s first ecological agriculture internship cohort recall at the Open Day how six months working the land — from Yinlin Farm to Yuefeng Island Organic Farm — changed their views on food, labour intensity, and life choices.
Lei Tiantian, who fled Shanghai to intern at Zhiliangtian Farm, chats with founder Ma Yanwei in the Tengger Desert: growing pumpkins, picking shacong (sand leek)—what kind of life do this generation of ‘new farmers’ actually lead?
At Zhiliangtian Farm by the Tengger Desert, each vine keeps one melon — a mere twelve hundred jin per mu. Four and a half months working Alxa’s land made me truly grasp farm owner Ma Yanwei’s point: improving soil and keeping groundwater sustainable matters more than producing ingredients.
Jeremy Clarkson ploughs with a Lamborghini tractor, herds sheep with drones, yet his annual net profit is just £144 – do the same pitfalls await farming in China? And how does the UK’s social support for agriculture compare with Chinese farmers’ circumstances?
A former programmer interned at two family farms in Pidu and Meishan – tilling soil, making compost, sun-drying pastes, packing vegetable boxes – and glimpsed the true face of returning to the land through the daily labours of Hu Xuemei and Chen Ying.
Through nearly 100 articles, 13 podcast episodes and more than 40 events, Foodthink recorded ordinary people’s food struggles during the pandemic and ecological smallholders’ climate adaptation practices, and sent its first cohort of young interns to 12 farms – leaving solid traces amid uncertainty.
