Introductions, activities, progress updates, participant records, and reviews related to the Lianhe Programme.
Lamb prices have slumped for years and imported frozen meat has flooded the market, trapping generations of Qinghai Lake herders in revolving debt: some sold their yaks at a pittance to deliver food in town; others carry 200,000-yuan loans, hoping each year for sheep prices to rebound.
“Scientific farming” in rural Northeast China is shaped largely by agri-supply dealers bundling drones with fertiliser. Maize fell to 1.1 yuan per jin after harvest; farmers spraying twice versus five–six times saw almost no yield difference. More output never brought more income.
Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, Jianing came to Yinlin Farm in Conghua. Among hens, goats, rain-thinned maize and old lychee trees planted by the older generation, she relearned to recognise the land and the farmers behind the food.
In summer 2024, agricultural drone pilots in Heilongjiang faced a harsh reality: pesticide drift compensation disputes, health damage amid a lack of labour protection, and per-mu service fees sliding from ten-odd yuan to 2.5 yuan.
In the salt-scarce, damp highlands, the Miao ancestors who migrated south to Yunnan-Guizhou replaced salt with fermented sourness. From rice-water white sour soup to tomato-and-chilli red sour soup, it has seeped into daily meals and festival rituals across all Guizhou’s peoples.
During three months pulling weeds, catching insects and raising seedlings at Xiqing Farm in Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi—participant in Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme—came to realise that the moments when body and land are honestly joined are far more precious than the harvest itself.
A post-90s couple, An Tian and San Qi, returned to Zhaixia Village, Longyan, Fujian, to grow passion fruit. Surrounding terraced fields were stained a withered yellow by the villagers’ herbicide, yet little by little they turned textbook Natural Farming into a way of getting along with this land.
Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, Chengzi took root for three months at Lexiangu Community Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai—growing vegetables, repairing roofs, leading goats and feeding ducks, running a market stall—and grew the courage to explore out of her uncertainty about the future.
On World Rainforest Day, Foodthink has compiled over a hundred reader comments via Jieshengzhi on “Fake Meat” Drives Out the Real Thing: from “Brazil’s deforestation has nothing to do with us” to “Forest-burning concerns every creature”, laying bare the full consumer-side divide over imported beef’s environmental cost.
Since the 1980s, Taizhou growers have criss-crossed the country growing watermelons. In Yannan Village in southern Jiangsu, twenty households make polytunnels their home, dismantling and rebuilding year after year, running husband-and-wife partnerships across land that demands crop rotation.
