Matthew 0:00

This is Feeding 1 in 6. China and the future of food. Presented by TABLE. I'm Matthew Kessler. Episode 3. Who grows the rice?

There's a kind of farming that resists being automated.

Lena 0:21

When we look at rice fields, at wet rice fields, at paddy fields - the shapes,  especially in mountain areas and where you have rice terraces - they are really not rectangular.

Matthew 0:33

Imagine tens of millions of small plots, no bigger than a football field, some even smaller.

Lena 0:39

If you would drive a tractor into such a small field, you would damage the whole field. Because you have this water inside the field and it shouldn't flow out. But if you drive a machine in there, you break the borders and the water will flow away.

Matthew 0:57

It's kind of amazing that a majority of China's most important staple crop is produced in this way - with over 200 million tonnes of paddy rice harvested annually.

Lena 1:09

You need like sensory and experience based knowledge — to look at the color, to hold, to see the firmness, or maybe even the smell. And machines don't always have that. Also for people to distinguish what is a weed and what is a rice plant.

Matthew 1:28

This is Lena Kaufmann. A social anthropologist at the University of Fribourg who has spent some years researching the villages of southern China, where she has learned rice is more than just a crop.

Lena 1:43

The word for rice, to eat, to have a meal - is chifan, is to eat rice, literally.

Matthew 1:49

And for centuries. Rice shaped where villages were built, how communities organised themselves, and even how time itself was measured.

Lena 1:59

I mean the lunar calendar that we usually see, such as the Chinese New Year for example. This is basically an agricultural calendar and much of this was set in relation to rice farming.

Matthew 2:11

And as we heard in our first episode, rice self-sufficiency isn't just an agricultural goal for the Chinese government - it's a political one.

Lena 2:20

Because this is also very closely tied to social stability of the country on the one hand, and also rice self-sufficiency is a key goal of the government to become more independent from geopolitical aspects.

Matthew 2:41

Before we visit the villages in Southern China where Lena did her fieldwork, it’s worth zooming out first. One of every three bowls of rice in the world is eaten in China. And it’s grown on less than one-fifth of the world’s rice-growing area. In the last seventy years, sustained investment from the state helped triple rice yields. Here’s a condensed version of how they did it:

In the 1950s and 60s, China expanded its irrigation infrastructure dramatically. This helped stabilize yields, as it made rice less dependent on natural rainfall.  In the 60s and 70s, a scientist named Yuan Longping changed the way that rice was bred and developed the first commercially viable hybrid rice varieties. These yield around 15 to 20% higher than conventional varieties, grown in the exact same conditions. By the 1990s, hybrid varieties covered more than half of China's rice area. And as farming and population pressures intensified, so did chemical inputs. China became the world’s largest fertilizer and pesticide user.  Together, these interventions - irrigation, genetics and fertilizers - brought rice yields from 2 tonnes per hectare to over 7.

But it came at a cost. To the land and the waterways. To seed diversity. To the health of farming communities. Many of the children who grew up in these villages are now in cities. Those who remain are aging, and often in poor health. This isn't unique to China, but nowhere has it happened faster or at a greater scale.

As President Xi Jinping says, China has kept its rice bowl firmly in its own hands. The question this episode is asking, is whose hands will be left to fill it?

Part 1 — Inside a rice village

Matthew 5:23

Lena Kaufmann has spent more than two decades researching what's happened to rice-growing villages as migration and technology reshape them. I wanted to first start with the basics, like where is rice grown across the country, what a rice farm looks like, is rice eaten at every meal, and what I thought was a simple question, how many rice farmers are there in China?

Lena 5:23

Yeah, it's very difficult to put this into statistics because there are no national statistics stating the exact number of rice farmers. I mean, we do have official statistics on the shares of the rural and the urban population and how this has been shifting. For example, that in 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, were still around 80% of the population was rural and people were farmers and now in recent years this has almost completely flipped. Like nearly 70% now of the population is officially urban..

Matthew 5:59

And do we have a sense of what an average rice farm looks like?

Lena 6:04

Yeah, so there are like really big differences in how these rice farms can look like. These differences are especially big if we look at the differences between north and south China. So in southern China you really find these very small patches of rice fields where one average farm size is very small, is something like half a hectare to one hectare combined. And in the northern plains, you have plains, which means that you can have much larger fields. You have bigger state farms there rather than small family farms. So there you find like more what you would see maybe sometimes in Europe or in the US. At least a little bit in that direction. So you like these bigger rectangular fields and not these small irregular patches.

Matthew 6:58

Lena did her research in the villages of southern China. Where the rice growing history dates back thousands of years. The vast majority of China's domestic rice supply comes from the South and center of the country, in the Yangtze Basin. One important factor in the south is the farmers can double-crop, meaning they plant and harvest twice in a single season. That's where we're headed now. I asked Lena to guide us to the village where she did her fieldwork in the south of the Hunan Province and what you might see when you get there.

Lena 7:34

Back then in the early 2000s the big roads were mud roads basically, and now actually they have been tarred, so you can reach the village by car now. You would see rather small densely packed houses, one next to each other. The space is so little surrounded by ricefields. And the actual village houses, many times the walls border one another. Because there is so little land and the population pressures are quite big. It's like an island, the village, and the fields are surrounding this island of houses, which are becoming bigger now. They used to be one story houses, or maybe with an attic to store some rice, but now with many people migrating, and people are investing into bigger cement houses. They're growing in size or in height. You would see these small plots of fields, many really very small like a garden plot and also very irregular in shape. And you would see hills, you would see small rivers, small canals passing on the side of the fields because they have to be fed with water. They have to be irrigated. Water has to flow in the fields, it has to come out again, it has to trickle down to the next fields that are a little bit further down on the terrace.

Matthew 9:14

This unique landscape is also becoming harder to farm. China's rice-growing regions are among the most climate-vulnerable agricultural systems. The double-cropping system depends on precise seasonal rainfall. In recent years, drought in the planting season and flooding at harvest time have disrupted that rhythm across multiple provinces simultaneously. 

And yet China has broken its own grain production record in each of the last two years — improving harvests in rice, wheat and corn, and passing 700 million tonnes of grain for the first time in 2024. Those yields are being achieved in spite of a climate that is making farming more difficult and less predictable. 

This is one of the reasons why the northeast is quietly becoming more important. It has the scale and capacity to grow more, and it's helped, oddly, by climate change. Warmer temperatures are pushing rice cultivation further north than ever before. This matters because rice remains a crucial part of this village's diet - eaten at basically every meal.

Lena 10:23

White rice remains the main staple food and it's valued higher than other types of staple food. Like people won't feel full if they eat, let's say like wheat noodles or something, they will feel that they're not full. In history people ate more brown rice, maybe not so husked like now and not so polished as right now and much less meat back then. And now diets have been shifting from more plants also towards much more meat like pork especially and a bit of chicken.

Matthew 11:04

Just a quick side note on diets and health that I found fascinating in researching this series.

China has been milling brown rice into white rice for over 2,000 years. Throughout history, this was a practice of the elites. That changed in the 19th century, when mechanical milling spread across Asia and helped make white rice affordable for everyone.

But milling strips out key nutrients including thiamine, or vitamin B1. A specific disease called Beriberi shortly followed wherever mechanical milling spread. The disease was eventually traced back to the missing bran layer of rice. This is one of the earliest examples of scientists identifying a nutritional deficiency.

The irony is that the households eating brown rice — often because they couldn't afford the milling cost — were actually eating a healthier grain. But white rice was what most people aspired to. Eating it was a sign of prosperity. Pretty similar to white bread in Europe and North America, which was once a luxury only the wealthy could afford.

In our last episode, we detailed how China feeds 1.4 billion people daily servings of pork, and documented some of those environmental, social and health costs too. Just like in that story, who benefits from this societal wide transition, and who gets left behind is a more complicated question. And a lot of that comes down to a household registration system that most people outside China have probably never heard of.

Part 2 — The hukou system and rural-urban migration

Matthew 13:13

Understanding the hukou system and how it works is key to understanding why so many people have left the countryside, and why, even after decades in the city, they never fully leave.

Lena 13:13

The hukou system is China's household registration system, which has also been described by various scholars as an internal passport system in China, because it basically classifies the whole entire population into either rural or urban; agricultural or non-agricultural. And you get ascribed this category by birth.

Matthew 13:38

So why does this matter?

Lena 13:40

So it determines - depending on which hukou you have, if you have a rural one or if you have an urban one - it determines whether you can fully access for example public education, healthcare, public housing, welfare benefits, and pensions and social insurance.

Matthew 13:59

If you're born with a rural agricultural hukou and move to a city, you won't have the same access to education and healthcare as someone born there. This is a system that was set up under Mao Zedong in 1958.

Lena 14:14

I mean, they're allowed to move now officially. Under Mao people were basically not allowed to move and to voluntarily choose the place where they want to work. This has changed in the 1980s, when 1984 people for the very first time were allowed actually to migrate to the cities. But then this doesn't give them the same urban benefits. And also for many years there was a situation in which rural children were not allowed to attend schools in the cities. So, I mean, this has somewhat changed, but still they usually need to come back to do their entrance examination. So it really creates these split families.

Matthew 14:57

There have been several reforms since. In 2014, some restrictions were relaxed that allow migrants more access to healthcare and education, mainly in smaller cities. Some medium-sized cities were added in 2022. More recently there have been proposals to abolish the agricultural classification entirely. That would mean that a migrant worker in Shanghai would have the same rights as someone born there. For now, the fundamental structure remains, and in the cities where many migrants want to live - Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen - the barriers are still very high. While cities have the most economic development - the jobs, the schools, the healthcare - a rural hukou still matters. In China, land is owned by village collectives, not individuals. But a rural hukou gives families the right to use that land — to live on it, to farm it. So even after years in a city, many rural migrants hold onto their hukou, because giving it up means giving up that land. It becomes a safety net: if you lose your job, get sick, or simply grow old, the land is still there. But it's also a tether - it ties people to a place, and to a system that many have spent decades trying to leave.

Li 16:25

So I come from rural China, Central China, Henan province. I grew up in a very poor peasant family there. And for various reasons, I start to trace where I come from through my research.

Matthew 16:39

That's Li Zhang from Amherst College who you heard in the last episode, talking about traditional pig farming in Guangxi. Li has spent years studying what happens to rural communities when the economic logic of migration pulls against the cultural logic of staying. Li and other scholars have documented a particular strategy that rural families use to navigate this tension.

Li 17:03

It has been a kind of open secret in China that peasant has this differentiated system. And later on scholar use the term one family, two systems.

Matthew 17:16

This is where farmers separate out their land. They set some aside for growing food for themselves. And as for the rest of it.

Li 17:24

Then they need cash crop, right. They need make sure the productivity of their cash crop. That is the kind of split.

Matthew 17:32

Often a cash crop or rice itself is grown intensively for sale - right alongside the kitchen garden the family actually eats from. Like the cash crops, rice is often grown with a heavy application of chemical inputs. By the 2000s, China was applying double the global average of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare of rice. Crops can't take up all that excess nitrogen, which leads to runoff - that pollutes the waters and acidifies the soils. China became both the world's largest producer and one of its largest users of pesticides. And in Chinese rice farming, pesticide overuse has been documented to kill natural predators of pests, and create health risks for the farming communities. Many farmers wouldn't choose to use this level of chemical inputs on the food they were eating themselves. So that's one version of one family and two systems. Another version of one family - two systems is to send someone to the city to earn money. You keep someone in the village to hold the land, which mean you effectively split the family so neither side loses everything. 

There's also a gender dimension to this that doesn't always get named. In many rice-producing regions, it's predominantly younger men who migrate first and stay the longest. What gets left behind is increasingly women - managing the fields, raising the children, caring for the elderly. This dynamic doesn't show up in the record-breaking production statistics. But it significantly shapes how these villages actually function.

Lena 19:15

If you look at the villages, which are basically empty now, you have a few old people left - those that are too old to work in the city, or who have maybe some illnesses and need to stay.

Matthew 19:28

In some cases, both parents leave to work in the cities and the grandparents are left to raise the grandchildren. They work there because of financial opportunity. But living in the city, their children don't have access to some basic services. Which leads to this really difficult situation.

Lena 19:46

Children many times don't even recognise their parents anymore when they come maybe once a year, or sometimes only every several years they come one time for the Chinese New Year. So for little children it's really difficult to even recognize their parents.

Matthew 20:07

The hukou system didn't create rural-urban migration. But it shaped every dimension of what that migration looks like - who goes, who stays, what gets left behind, and whether families can ever fully reunite. It's the invisible architecture behind the emptying villages. And it's the reason why, even for people who've spent decades in a city, that small plot back home matters. It's also worth naming what the system did for China's cities and factories. Migrant workers arriving to cities without an urban hukou status had no social safety protections. That made them cheap to employ and easy to dismiss. The same system that constrained rural families also supplied China's manufacturing boom and helped make China the industrial powerhouse it is today, relying on a seemingly unending pool of low-cost, low-protection labor. But there's another side to this story. Rural living standards in China have risen dramatically over the same period. According to the World Bank, nearly 800 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last four decades - with the majority of them from the countryside. That's the largest poverty reduction in human history, achieved in a single generation. The migration that emptied the villages also funded the houses that replaced the old ones. They're the same story, told from different angles. There's another force that reshaped village life in that same period. We now turn to the moment a new agricultural technology arrived.

Part 3 — The combine harvester

Matthew 22:20

In the mid-1990s, in the village in Hunan where Lena was doing her research, the county government brought a combine harvester to a village. It had come from another province, and most people there had never seen one before.

Lena 22:20

And this was a spectacle - according to these written accounts - hundreds, thousands of people gathered around that machine to watch this spectacle of this huge machine suddenly doing in a few minutes the work that several people would do in a day or in several days even. So obviously it was very astonishing for people to see that back then.

Matthew 22:46

To understand why that was such a moment, you need to understand what harvest time actually looked like before it arrived.

Lena 22:53

When you harvest in the summer and you plant two crops of rice, you have the harvesting of the first crop and the transplanting of the second crop almost all occurring at the same time, which people call the double rush, shuangqiang, locally. It needs a lot of labor and you need to work for hours in that field. Some people described how at that time there were a lot of insects in the fields, sometimes snakes. The sun was scorching. You had to cut it using a sickle, a hand sickle, bending down again, and cutting bushel by bushel of rice.

Matthew 23:34

So when the machine arrived, people welcomed it.

Lena 23:37

Even also today, if you talk to people they generally welcome these machines because it does ease them from a lot of hard labor.

Matthew 23:46

But a combine harvester costs money. A lot of it. And not everyone had it.

Lena 23:52

Very few people can afford that, so when I went to the village in the early 2010s, there was just one family who owned a combine harvester, and they were the richest family in the village. They lived in a nice house. They were the only one who had a wall around their house and a compound. And then other people would hire the services of that one villager, which also took him and his family as he claimed eight years to save up money to buy, including through migrant work. The other people did not really like that family very much because it created a lot of social difference then of some people who own these machines getting richer through the money that they take from fellow villagers.

Matthew 24:44

In addition to widening the wealth gap, the arrival of this technology also affected how people relate to each other.

Lena 24:51

More recently there are actually even three combined harvesters in the village now. But now you have farmers complaining that everything has become a transaction suddenly. Like in the past, maybe people would help each other to build a house, help each other to transplant and to harvest. And suddenly you pay your neighbors, you pay maybe even people who are your relatives or distant relatives. So it has created a situation of very big social differences and also of awkward situations, that suddenly you pay people for things that are close to you that in the past you didn't pay.

Matthew 25:43

Just like in other countries, the arrival of the combine harvester fundamentally changed people's relationship with food production. And the technology keeps changing. What's coming now are drones and other digital technologies. And the gap between those who own it and those who hire it keeps widening. That's a story we'll return to as we forecast what this village might look like in another generation.

Part 4 — Trying to grow differently

Matthew 27:33

So far, we've focused on the production side - the farmers leaving the village, new technologies, an aging countryside. But something was shifting on the demand side too that would eventually lead its way back to the villages: a question around food safety. Cadmium contamination in rice from industrial pollution was seeping into paddy soils. This became a documented concern across multiple southern provinces. In 2013, Guangzhou authorities found that 44% of rice tested exceeded cadmium safety limits. Pesticide residues were being detected in vegetables. So in the early 2000s, a growing number of urban consumers began to ask a question that hadn't really been asked before - is my food safe to eat? Li Zhang, assistant professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, has been researching how that question reshaped Chinese agriculture from the ground up.

Li 27:33

Around 2007, 2008, with the San Lu baby milk powder scandal, there was this whole surge of public panic about food safety.

Matthew 27:49

The San Lu scandal — in which infant formula was found to be contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine — killed 6 babies and sickened 300,000 others. Li has documented additional major food safety incidents every year across the following decade, including dead pigs being disposed of into the Huangpu River.

Li 28:10

Alternative food networks also start around this time period. Also mushroomed since then, because there has been this public awareness. Meanwhile, the state, the government, was also getting to the point like we need to take action, because it's really shake the political legitimacy of governance.

Matthew 28:36

If food isn't perceived as safe to eat, it could undermine trust in China's entire food system. Major food safety incidences also created a new group: urban consumers who were actively looking for alternatives.

Li 28:50

I would really want to emphasize the specific characteristic of China's Alternative Food Networks. They wouldn't just say ecologically. That was pretty much - safer food was pretty much the major call - the motivation.

Matthew 29:07

This is the context in which a small village in Henan province - Bian village - became something of a national symbol for a different way of farming. Li Zhang has been conducting fieldwork there since 2013.

Li 29:21

It was really a kind of network-driven initiative. It started with scholar-slash-activist group, of course they also became urban food consumers, to try to figure out how to grow food and secure some kind of safer food. That was pretty much the motivation. It was also a kind of initiative to connect the rural and urban through the food chain. So the pollution free rice, or hazard free rice, gonghai dami. It was actually featured as one of the first ecological cooperatives, in the new era compared with the more collective, socialist time period, right?

Matthew 29:55

I want to introduce you to Zhang Yan bin. He was a community leader, at one point the party secretary, and the driving force behind the cooperative that grew what they were calling pollution-free rice. He worked closely with the scholar-activists, connecting rural producers with urban consumers seeking safer food. He sought and finally received an organic certificate. Pollution-free or organic rice costs more to produce - because it foregoes the subsidised chemical inputs that make conventional rice cheaper to grow. That cost gets passed to the consumer. Which means the whole model depends on urban consumers who are both aware of the problem and willing to pay to solve it. And for a while, this scheme worked. It even attracted national attention. In 2009 the village received a high profile visit from then Vice-President Xi Jinping. That visit mattered more than it might seem. In China, this isn't just symbolic. It creates a layered form of legitimacy. It tells politicians, investors and consumers that this is a model that can and should be replicated. But it's a little more complicated than that.

Li 31:12

Often time when we look at the Chinese state, we will often time just assume, this is the policy from Beijing.

Matthew 31:19

I want to spend a minute talking about this relationship between the central state government, and the government at the provincial and local level. There is sometimes a gap between policy intention and implementation, and we see it across a few different sectors. Here the central government was promoting ecological farming — it appears clearly in policy documents like their five-year plans, right alongside agriculture modernization and adoption of new technologies. So the local and provincial governments face different pressures. They're evaluated and financially rewarded based on meeting production targets, which makes intensive cash crops far more attractive than supporting ecological rice cooperatives. So for a time, Bian village became a model. A proof of concept that a different kind of farming was possible. But it didn't last. Demand for the premium product dried up, and the economic incentives weren't there to sustain it.

Li 32:22

However, last year when I visited him, he told me that all the organic certificates was actually just put aside. He had to give up organic production. Main reason: lack of market. The consumption had been dropping. So no one would really want to pay the high-end price for organic rice.

Matthew 32:50

The core problem was the market. When the economy slowed and food safety fell out of the news cycle, consumer willingness to pay a premium largely disappeared. The government had responded to the San Lu scandal with a new food safety law passed in 2009. While enforcement remained patchy, the most visible scandals became less frequent. For many urban consumers, that was enough. The urgency of food safety faded, and the market didn't develop further.

Li 33:21

What he has been still holding up is that even though it's not organic 'organic' now, he's still trying to incorporate as much as possible the more ecological farming.

Matthew 33:35

Bian village didn't become the model it briefly seemed to be. But what Li found there pointed to something unexpected. The networks that emerged after the San Lu scandal were built on urban consumers seeking safer food. But the supply of that food didn't always come from idealistic farmers making a conscious choice to farm differently. It often came from farmers who had no choice at all but to produce this way.

Li 34:02

The poorest peasant, oftentimes, would not have the incentive to pay for more agrochemicals. They would actually have roughly more agroecological products in their backyard.

Matthew 34:14

In other words, some of the most naturally produced food in China is coming from households too poor, too remote, or too old to farm any other way. That's not a comfortable conclusion, but it tells you something important about where the real alternatives actually live, how precarious they are. And why they shouldn't be romanticized. What's also at stake, though, is something beyond food safety. Many of these households are the last custodians of traditional seed varieties - rice adapted to local soils and climates over generations. When they stop farming, that knowledge and those seeds can disappear with them.

Part 5 — The future of rural China

Matthew 36:58

The Chinese government has an answer to the emptying countryside. It's called rural revitalization, and it runs on tourism, cultural heritage and technology. Imagine drones spraying pesticides across terraced fields. Sensors monitoring soil moisture in real time. Precision agriculture systems telling a farmer exactly when to plant and when to harvest. 

A new aspirational category of farmer has even been named: the Xin Nongren - the new farmer. Young, tech-savvy, sometimes a return migrant who left for the city and came back to the village with the skills they didn't have before.

And if you look at recent trends, there are genuine signs of environmental progress backed by action. China now accounts for a significant share of global reforestation efforts.  Some studies suggest a quarter of the global increase in tree cover is happening inside China’s borders. And on the farming side, nitrogen use efficiency has improved and nitrogen pollution is falling, without compromising yields.

Though there’s also a tension worth naming here. China’s effort to revitalize the countryside is using the same tools that have depopulated it until now. I asked both Lena and Li what they think the countryside will actually look like in the decades ahead.

Lena 36:58

I expect that we see a patchwork really, because the whole country is so full of contradictions. Some people will say the countryside is so backward and so poor. Other people maybe have the opposite image and see this technology and see these drones, greenhouses and farming robots and self-driving tractors, and think, "wow actually China appears quite advanced," at least in their imagination. But I expect we will really have everything in parallel. If you look at different generations of technologies. I saw many people were using technologies in parallel. They were using combine harvesters and hiring the services, but they continued to keep a sickle nevertheless and to use a sickle because there were angles maybe where the combine harvester couldn't pass, couldn't reach or would get stuck in the mud.

Matthew 38:04

That image, the sickle alongside the drone, captures something important. Both existing, side by side, in the same village, sometimes in the same field, because that's what the landscape and the household situation actually require.

Lena 38:21

Each technology affords a very different social setup. We were talking about how technologies are linked to migration and to a specific household situation. So depending on what household situation you have: if you have small children, if you have a son about to marry, if you need money immediately, or if you have a lot of people at home - you can really play with that. And farmers do. They adapt.

Matthew 38:53

And smallholder farming - the thing that everyone has been predicting will disappear - may be more durable than the predictions suggest.

Lena 39:02

In my research, I found that this remains viable. We will probably have some fields which are highly mechanized with self-driving tractors passing through them. We will have companies and cooperatives coming into farm where people have left. I'm very sure we will have smallholders, and also some return migrants as well.

Matthew 39:32

Li Zhang is less certain about what the state calls rural revitalization.

Li 39:38

I'm up for this kind of call for rural revitalization. However, who should define what revitalization is, and for whom? The state and the scholars, even people like me, even the people who move to the rural area or who actually stays there, who decides to return. I do think that's a huge question.

Matthew 40:00

These questions: who decides the policies, who the technology serves, what will happen to the nearly 500 million people who still live in China's countryside. They haunt Li. Especially given that so many of them are aging, and in poor health — health crises that Li documents as a pattern of gradual, structural harm. What she calls slow death. This isn't abstract for Li. She told me her mother died last year. Lung cancer, at 65. She had just started drawing her pension. A pension she had paid into herself for years. Her father has been disabled by diabetes for fifteen years.

Li 40:45

There is this huge generational sacrifice, which is really my parents' generation, who became the first generation of migrant workers, and who were still farmers, and who continued to return to their countryside after their health declined. They are the ones being pushed aside, and forgot. Forgotten by state policy. Of course, the state has been trying to address their issue. But honestly, it's not enough.

Matthew 41:16

The model village - Bian village, the pollution-free rice, the organic certificate that had to be abandoned - was a genuine attempt to answer the question of whether a different kind of farming could survive inside this system. What persists looks a lot like that patchwork Lena described - the sickle alongside the drone. People adapting with the tools and the land they have available. Next week, we turn to the water, and follow a similar story, but with a different outcome.

Xuefei 41:52

If you ever have the chance to fly over by plane along China's coast, you can just pay attention to how the coast has been transformed. The entire coastline of China. So there are like ponds, hundreds or thousands of ponds along the coast. That's how the Chinese is producing fish. There is no visible large scale.

Matthew 42:16

That's next time on Feeding One in Six.Thanks so much for listening.  If you enjoyed this, if you found some value from it, please share it with three other people, and leave us a review wherever you listen. 

You can find an annotated transcript and links to the work of our guests, on the series webpage: https://tabledebates.org 

This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust.

A huge thanks as always to the expert reviewers: Beibei Yin, Carmen Lee, Jack Thompson and Jackie Turner.

This series was produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Support on mixing and sound design by Martin Palmqvist. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you next week.