Climate change and variability are predicted to have dramatic impacts on weather patterns, food production, ecosystem health, species distributions, and human health. Although climate change is a global phenomenon, its impacts on developing countries will be strongest on vulnerable sectors such as agriculture and fisheries which substantially constitute rural livelihoods. Owing to higher costs and difficulty in mitigating climate change by decreasing carbon emission and promoting carbon capture and sequestration, adaptation to climate change becomes the research focus of international academia in the 21st century. As the most important stakeholders of climate change, farmers'perceptions and adaptation to climate change are essential to human mitigation. However, this study raises many important and largely unresolved issues about farm-level climate change adaptation. Based on recent theoretical and empirical studies, this paper provides an overview of farmers' perception and a series of adaptation strategies to combat climate change and variability at the farm-level. Based on clarifying the definitions of climate change and climate variability, the review summarizes the farmers 'perceptions of climate change and variability and finds that the extent to which farmers are aware of climate change is uneven. Some farmers are reported to gain the accurate perceptions of climate change, while others gain contradictory results. Many factors, including key extreme climatic events, magnitude of climate variability, social-cultural backgrounds, political-economic conditions, direct experience, climate information, public propaganda, and prejudice of media, household characteristics, and individual knowledge, would play an important role in shaping farmers'perceptions. Moreover, we systematically summarize a range of strategies adopted by farmers to cope with climate change and variability. However, whether these strategies are primary adaptation to climate change is debatable. Besides climate change and variability, other socio-economic and political determinants of these strategies should not be neglected. Finally, several research prospects are put forward to promote China's future related research.