Foodthink’s third Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme has finally selected 25 interns for mentorship across 12 farms. From designers and civil servants to PhD holders and charity-sector workers, they set aside their city jobs to relearn farming and sustainable living on the land.
Drawing on years of reporting, Foodthink shows how China’s small-scale ecological farmers grow healthy produce without relying on chemical inputs — from pest and disease management and soil management to permaculture and other farming systems — and previews the agricultural training courses set to launch in 2024.
From Jingyang in Shaanxi to Hainan, Harbin and Beijing, four Spring Festival tables each have their own flavour. Small-town dining is quietly drifting towards big-city standards — yet the rice noodles a Shaoyang local scoops into their own basin still hit the mark better than Dianping’s high-rated chains.
The Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market is China’s most mature Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) initiative, but high organisational costs, the care burden on female consumers, and mainstream scale-oriented competition are constantly compromising the ideal of producers and consumers co-negotiating food standards.
The marketing rhetoric of premium supermarkets, the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel, legislation shaped by lobbying from large agribusinesses—quality is no natural concept, and consumers and smallholder farmers remain ever on the margins of this chain of power.
Five months on Foodthink’s ecological agriculture internship programme at Green Me Farm in Xianyang — from driving tractors and harvesting wheat to caring for the soil through Biodynamic farming. The greatest harvest wasn’t technique, but a fresh look at the condition of the land, food and animals.
Foodthink’s third Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme welcomes four new farms, with twelve partner farms spread across Guangdong, Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and beyond. Interns will learn crop cultivation, animal husbandry and farm management from experienced growers out in the fields.
This episode of Food Talk visits Pingren Farm in Changping, Beijing. Food doctoral researcher Zhou Chen, cultivation technician Zhao Fei and home cook Auntie Li discuss releasing the fixation on looks, learning more about production and engaging all five senses to come closer to truly “good food”.
Early 2024: over thirty thousand farmers drove five thousand tractors into Berlin against scrapping the agricultural diesel tax rebate. The real fury was systemic injustice: after over 170 years of subsidies tethering agriculture to fossil fuels, small farms bore the cost crisis alone while large farms harvested theirs.
At Letian Bay Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai, pest damage has left barely any organic maize, the local farm workers don’t buy into the no-spraying method, and the farm’s real revenue comes from land rental and activity experiences – not selling vegetables.
