地点：@美国驻华大使馆
Brown Bag Lunch Talk
内容：Shared Harvest：Community Supported Agriculture in China by Dr. SHI Yan
12 to 1pm, Friday, August 10

In Beijing, the countryside can seem very far away – and farming can seem like an abstract activity, unconnected to our own daily meals, to our own personal consumption of meat and eggs and vegetables.  Shared Harvest is a public-interest, service-oriented social enterprise started by a group of young people who care deeply about promoting sustainable farming and sustainable lifestyles.  The goal of the project is to shorten the distance between Beijing’s farmers and consumers, while offering a new model for sustainable rural-urban cooperation.  At the heart of Shared Harvest is a direct partnership between a local Tongzhou farmer, Mr. Lang, and a team of young people from a variety of backgrounds with experience in managing Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives.  Mr. Lang has his own land, but has struggled in recent years to earn a sufficient income from his crops.  As part of Shared Harvest, he has agreed to follow organic principles in cultivating vegetables on his land – while the team of recent college grads works to organize and educate consumers through a CSA framework.  This cooperative partnership serves as the cornerstone for a model that we hope will grow to make farmer livelihoods more secure and family meals ‘greener’ and more delicious – both in the village of Mafang, where Shared Harvest is located, and throughout the larger Beijing community.

Shi Yan is the executive director of Shared Harvest.  She received her PhD from the Renmin University School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Tsinghua University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she heads the Tsinghua Center for Community Food Security Research and Promotion.  In 2008, Shi Yan spent six months working on a small organic farm in Minnesota to learn more about the CSA model.  After returning to China, she helped to found Little Donkey Farm, and has been consistently involved in promoting the CSA model and the development of sustainable agriculture in China.  She has also published Chinese translations of three related books: Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan; Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture; and Slow Money.