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.
GRAIN’s report tracks the carbon credit projects Bayer, Cargill and other agrichemical companies are pushing on Asia’s farmland: farmers locked into decades-long contracts dictating their practices, getting just about 10% of the revenue, and bundled into buying seeds and pesticides.
Historian Duan Zhiqiang of Fudan named four plots on Chongming Island “the Mainland”, “the Subcontinent”, “the New World”, “the Offshore Island”, poring over farm books, working out composting and melon-growing. Fellow city grower Wang Youzao recognised Su Shi and Lu You in soil and old texts — and himself.
In 1970s Langhao Gou, most sow-thistle we dug fed the pigs; a handful made the family’s summer meal. Now it is wellness tea at several hundred yuan a jin, a stress-relief pastime for city youth. Who still remembers where that clean bitterness, its sweet aftertaste, came from?
Foodthink invites Leila Yow, Climate Programme Officer at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), to discuss the monopoly landscape of global meat and dairy companies, their climate impact, and policy paths to rein in corporate power – this Friday, 11 September, in Beijing and online.
Brazil’s smallholder farmers are breaking free from pesticides and chemical fertilisers, moving towards agroecology, while consumers drive change back to the production end. Experienced food and farming practitioner Bia Goll from São Paulo shares twenty-plus years of practice. Saturday, 12 September, afternoon – Beijing in-person + online livestream.
Jin Lipeng, lecturer at the School of Experimental Art, Chongqing’s Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, led students on Huxi Campus in raising chickens and composting through Permaculture. After summer construction workers stole 10 chickens and 2 geese, the school decided to no longer permit poultry on campus, ending its year-and-a-half-old Happy Chickens Raising Cooperative.
Three young directors with a China–France perspective plunge into rural China, following in six episodes Mum Hu, Chen Xi, Fanli, Dahai and other ecological farmers who left old lives to re-root in the land. The Life on the Land team meets audiences after two Beijing screenings, 12–13 September.
How a pig is raised, why riders race against the clock – once you know, some people genuinely can’t bring themselves to buy it any more. We’d love to hear the inner conflict behind those “I don’t want to keep buying this” moments, and that little sense of “morality”.
Tianxingzhou’s old melon farmers moved to Lüdao Residential Community in 2002 for flood discharge. Now those resettlement flats face demolition again for the Yangchun Lake Business District plan; ferry suspended, black storks have quintupled, and the old community held by shared labour and food exchanges is being scattered.
