Back to Burning: What Went Wrong with Crop Residue Field Incorporation in the Northeast?

By late April, farmers across Heilongjiang Province are immersed in spring planting preparations. Following local agricultural custom, they begin with a traditional field-clearing burn to remove crop residue, followed by rotary tillage and sowing. Travelling along the roads, intermittent wisps of white smoke from these burns are frequently visible. The aftermath is equally omnipresent: scorched corn stalks and rice stubble scattered across the fields.

These days mark the tail end of the burning season. Over the past month and a half, crop residue across Northeast China’s farmland has been burned off field by field, acting as a major driver of the region’s air pollution this spring. On 1 April, reduced visibility caused by nearby field burns even triggered a multi-vehicle collision and fire on the Suihua section of the He-Ha Expressway.

Another facet of the story is the farmers’ palpable relief: restrictions were finally lifted last year, meaning they no longer have to secretly torch their fields in fear of getting caught. The village party secretary also breathed a sigh of relief, noting, “Who would dare stop ordinary people from farming?”

During the autumn and winter of 2015, severe smog enveloped the three northeastern provinces, with crop residue burning identified as a primary pollutant. As a result, from autumn 2016 onwards, enforcing a ban on burning crop residue became a top political priority across the region. The Jilin provincial party committee and government, for example, took direct command, establishing a county, township, and village grid-based management system to oversee the ban. They also implemented an assessment framework requiring “cascading accountability to ensure that every individual bears responsibility for implementation.” Heilongjiang and Liaoning subsequently introduced dedicated schemes to roll out similar grid-based responsibility networks. This signalled a decisive shift in the region’s approach: moving from past reliance on publicity and mobilisation to a new phase of rigid, top-down accountability.

Stringent policies carry a substantial financial and labour burden. In a township within Harbin’s Hulan District, a village party secretary recalled that after each autumn harvest, the village had to spend around 10,000 yuan to employ four or five people to stand guard in the fields for days on end to prevent burning. The village also maintained a communal fund; should satellite imagery spot a blaze, money would be automatically deducted from it, and village officials would face joint liability, often resulting in warnings or disciplinary sanctions.

Beyond simple bans, the authorities also sought alternative ways to manage crop residue. Having trialled numerous measures such as crop residue field incorporation and field removal, they ultimately had to revert to the old practice of open burning, given the poor results and strong opposition from the farming community. Yet there has been progress: a shift from the disorderly open burning of the past to what policy documents now describe as ‘precise’, ‘scientific’ and ‘orderly’ burning. The *Ecological and Environmental Code*, passed by the National People’s Congress in March this year, also enshrines this top-level guidance: “local people’s governments at all levels shall strengthen the organisation, guidance and management of the burning of crop residue, fallen leaves and other materials in a scientific and precise manner”.

The most noticeable change for local farmers is that authorities now monitor weather forecasts, identify days with favourable atmospheric dispersion, and announce designated burning windows in advance. This information cascades down the administrative hierarchy, culminating with village party secretaries notifying their residents, after which crop residue can be burnt.

From a stringent political mandate spearheaded by provincial committees in 2016 to the de facto easing of restrictions this year, what has the past decade of misguided crop residue policies meant for farmers across Northeast China? Why have they consistently resisted official crop residue utilisation schemes, and why does burning it all remain their preferred option?

Defeated by the Ridges

The households we visited during this trip were primarily maize growers. Following local custom, once spring arrives and the ground thaws, the dry, windy conditions prompt farmers to set a traditional field-clearing burn. They would then rotary-till a layer of wood ash and crop residue into the soil, making it ready for sowing. The mandatory crop residue field incorporation policy introduced an extra agricultural operation: chaffing the stalks and deep-ploughing them into the ground. This, in turn, necessitated a second step: re-forming the field ridges.

This lies at the heart of why maize crop residue field incorporation ultimately failed. Nearly every farmer we interviewed agreed: once the ridges were destroyed, it was simply unacceptable.

Deep ploughing involves incorporating the chopped maize stalks and stubble into the soil, typically to a depth of 30 to 40 centimetres. The crop residue must be thoroughly buried; otherwise, it will obstruct seed root growth. Given the sheer volume of maize stalks, extra care is needed to ensure they are adequately chopped and deeply incorporated. Agricultural instructional videos often stress that if the initial chaffing is insufficient, tractors must make a second pass to break up the remaining clumps.

Once deep-ploughed, the ground is left uneven and littered with soil clods of all sizes, rendering it unfit for immediate sowing. Additional passes are therefore required to break up the clods and use a roller to level and compact the field. Yet the most consequential drawback of deep ploughing is that it obliterates the existing ridges. Neither deep ploughing nor ridge construction can be done by hand; both require specialised machinery that individual farmers simply cannot manage themselves.

Standard rotary tillers only cut to a depth of around 20 centimetres. To achieve deep ploughing, farmers therefore need to bring in additional machinery fitted with a large plough, such as a heavy-duty mouldboard (reversible) plough, which can easily cost over 100,000 yuan. Contractor fees add another 400 yuan per shang (≈1 hectare / 15 mu). In the village we visited, which farms nearly 10,000 mu of land, the annual bill for deep ploughing alone climbs to 260,000 yuan.

To promote crop residue field incorporation, the government subsidises machinery operators to provide these services. Farmers’ attitudes towards deep ploughing, however, are sharply divided. In Hulan District, Harbin, farmers generally report that deep ploughing increases soil porosity. When winter snowfall is light and strong winds blow in early spring, soil moisture declines, failing to achieve adequate soil moisture conservation. This hampers seedling emergence and can lead to crop lodging as plants mature. The problem is further compounded if excessive residue remains unshredded and unincorporated into the soil.

Further east, however, some farmers in Bayan and Bin counties see the value in deep ploughing. “With all that chemical fertiliser, the soil has completely compacted,” one older farmer remarked. “Deep ploughing at least loosens it up.” As for the issues caused by overly loose soil, he believes simply running a soil roller over the field afterwards is sufficient.

Yet when it comes to the final step—ridge formation—farmers are united in their opposition. Indeed, poorly formed ridges have arguably become the single most significant reason for their resistance to crop residue field incorporation.

Standing by the roadside and gazing out at the vast stretches of bare soil that sweep to the horizon during spring ploughing, one can fully appreciate the sense of “vast lands and sparse population”. But the land as farmers see it is altogether different from what outsiders observe. What appears to be a single tract of several hundred mu may actually be a patchwork of plots belonging to a handful, or even a dozen or more families. They demarcate their boundaries by ridges, not by area. Not only must the number of ridges remain unchanged, but their width and spacing should ideally stay the same too, as these dimensions directly affect crop growth.

In previous years, after burning the crop residue, farmers would drive their rotary tillers along the existing ridges, churning the corn stubble (the unburnt roots) into the soil, and then plant. Re-creating the ridges was only necessary every few years, or longer, when the village organised a deep ploughing of the fields, and even then, it was usually done by a trusted local machine operator. Crop residue field incorporation means the ridges have to be re-formed every single year, and the work is often subcontracted to outside operators who can claim the subsidies. The ridges they produce are all over the place, “big ones big, small ones small.” In a certain village in Hulan District, locals voice plenty of grievances when the subject of forming ridges comes up.

The village party secretary is equally stumped: “It causes massive disputes. One family says their plot’s too wide, another says theirs is too narrow, and then they come making trouble for you (the village committee). Nobody can stand it. If we can’t resolve it for them, and it prompts a petition to higher authorities, what are we to do?”

The War Over Ridges

On the afternoon of 30 April, by a road just outside Hulan District, a group of elderly farmers huddled along a field edge, arguing heatedly. They were fighting over how to mark out the ridges. It turned out that the relatively small patch of land in front of them was actually two neighbouring plots joined together. A utility pole, used as a boundary marker, became the focal point of the dispute. Hu Shunyi, a middle-aged man on an electric bike, told us with a helpless sigh that he was the village party secretary and had been called in at 9 a. m. to mediate. Yet hours later, there was still no resolution.

Standing in the middle of the crowd was a tall man in his fifties or sixties, wearing a cap. He kept chiming in: “Old auntie, is this utility pole yours?” “Once you lot sort this out, I’ll start the rotary tiller!”

This was the machine operator who had been working in the village for years. Hu Shunyi vouched for him: “He has a great feel for it, works meticulously, and the villagers all trust him.” Forced to stand by and watch, unable to start his work, the operator grew increasingly anxious.

Eventually, an old auntie lost her patience. Wearing leather shoes, she marched into the field, placing each foot squarely on a ridge and counting as she went. By the time she reached the utility pole, she had counted 32 ridges—providing a solid factual basis for the argument. The two sides quickly reached an agreement. The operator turned to one of them and joked, “I’ll be putting ten thousand yuan aside tonight.” He hopped onto the rotary tiller, and with a loud rumble, began working back and forth along the field edge. The crowd scattered.

A scene like this instantly revealed to us, as outsiders, just how vital field ridges are. They determine whether an extra row of crops can be sown, but they also serve to demarcate boundaries and dictate rental rates. Typically, the machinery operator will only consider the task complete once he has formed the ridges, allocated them among neighbouring households according to the ledger, and secured everyone’s agreement.

The sheer complexity of field operations, farmers’ meticulous accounting for and fierce defence of every inch of land, and the grassroots backlash from any top-down, blanket mobilisation may all far exceed what distant urban policymakers can imagine: disputes can easily arise even with local machinery operators hired by the farmers themselves over how the ridges are built, let alone when dealing with outside operators whom they cannot oversee or trust.

Hu Shunyi also concedes that many of these agricultural machine operators are incompetent handlers—a local slang term for careless or unskilled workers. Even with satellite guidance, they cannot form the ridges straight. A single pass back and forth can leave ridge widths varying by seven or eight centimetres, failing to align into continuous rows. As the machine moves along, it is not uncommon for a household to end up missing a ridge or two.

The Woes of Rice Farmers

Rice cultivation does not require ridge formation. Chen Jie, a rice farmer we met, said that during the years when the burning ban was most strictly enforced, they had no choice but to use boats to gather and haul away the straw.

The harvesters only strip the grain heads, leaving the long, slender stalks behind. Chen Jie had never heard of any machinery capable of shredding and incorporating rice residue into the soil, nor did any collectors come to bale it. As a result, all the stalks were left in the paddies, requiring workers to manually scoop them out.

This work is often delayed until early spring. As autumn arrives and temperatures drop, hired labourers head to the cornfields instead, and few are willing to wade into the flooded fields wearing boots.

They rely on vehicles to haul the straw away, but when heavy winter snows fall, the damp straw can only be gathered by boat. “It is grueling work and utterly exhausting,” they say. Daily wages for labourers run from a minimum of 200 yuan to as high as 280. Five or six workers, a handful of boats, and a week of labour—all of it amounts to an extra cost that farmers must absorb entirely on their own.

Even so, the rice straw still cannot be cleared properly, Chen Jie says. They have no choice but to wait until spring, when they forcibly till the stalks and the stubble at the very base straight into the soil during rotary tillage. Even so, “every step kicks up a crunching tangle of straw.” When the weather warms, the straw soaking in the soft, sodden soil will rot and bubble. More than one rice farmer has noted that the hydrogen sulphide gas produced by the anaerobic decomposition of crop residue “poisons” the rice plants, blackening their roots and causing seedlings to die.

In soil like this, Chen Jie says, transplanted seedlings struggle to take root, and pest infestations have grown worse too. Back when crop residue burning was still permitted, they needed to apply pesticides at most one or twice a season; now they are spraying six or seven times.

The stricter the ban on burning, the heavier the fertiliser use. For the past couple of years, Chen Jie applied 10 to 11 bags of fertiliser per shang. Since last year, when burning restrictions began to ease, she only used eight bags after burning the fields. ‘The straw ash still does some of the work,’ she said.

Residue Removal Is Also Difficult

In fact, beyond field incorporation, baling and transporting crop residue for use as fuel, compost, or substrate is another viable option. Resource recovery from crop residue should have had a strong market in the northeast — the heating season lasts nearly half a year, and several village officials and residents say that power plants and heating facilities are willing to purchase the residue for burning.

Yet in the counties and districts east of Harbin we visited, just as the mere mention of field ridges fills farmers with grievance, the topic of baling draws forth no less complaint.

The cause is almost absurdly straightforward, akin to “poorly formed ridges” — the baling simply does not clear the fields thoroughly. Typically, machinery operators receive subsidies based on the area they work. The reality, however, is that balers (specifically crop residue pick-up and baling machines) leave behind scattered stalk fragments when passing through maize fields. These fragments do not form contiguous patches. Farmers can no longer set the whole field alight to clear it, leaving them to hire labourers to gather the remnants by hand. Workers earn 100 yuan a day. With the residue compacted into the soil, they cannot even finish gathering a single mu (≈0.067 hectares) in a day.

Hu Shunyi, the village party secretary, recalls that about six years ago, the village introduced centralised baling and residue removal. To clear the root stubble left behind, farmers were forced to harrow the fields over and over. “The seedlings have already grown this tall” — he spreads his thumb and forefinger to show the distance — “and we’re still picking out tiny bits of crop residue from the soil. The folks just won’t have it. “You do the rotary tillage for us, and I still end up gathering residue seven times over!””

Never having received a single penny in compensation while going into debt on labour costs, farmers no longer want their crop residue baled and hauled away. On occasion, villagers would secretly set the fields ablaze before the balers even arrived. In Bin County, outside operators once tried to come and collect the residue removal subsidies, but locals kept a strict watch during daylight hours, forcing them to “sneak into the farmers’ fields and bale in the middle of the night.”

Another reason farmers resist baling is that the balers and trucks compact the arable land as they roll in, leaving it hard as rock. The farmers are then left to rototill the soil soft again themselves before planting can begin.

An elderly farmer in Bayan County recalled that in the early days, before crop residue field incorporation was introduced, field removal was the first measure implemented. But once baling was brought in, farmers raised strong objections. Some even burned their stalks in a rush to beat the machinery operators to it, fearing they would return to bale the residue. “The money went into other people’s pockets, leaving the old farmers with nothing but trouble.” he said.

He endured a year of failed field removal. The following year, having learned from the experience, the government switched to deep ploughing for residue incorporation. Whether the machinery operators cut corners to save fuel or there were other technical snags, the ploughing simply wasn’t thorough enough. Corn seeds ended up sitting on top of the residue, unable to take root or send up seedlings. That year’s yield was a mere 900 jin (450 kg; 1 jin = 0.5 kg) per mu—normal harvests run between 2,100 and 2,200 jin. The financial loss was devastating.

From then on, the farmer flatly refused to let the government have any more say over his fields, and went back to burning the crop residue.

Data published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2018 indirectly underscores the challenges of rolling out field removal: crop residue incorporation covered 743 million mu nationwide, compared with just 88 million mu for baling and collection—the scale of incorporation far outstripping that of field removal.

Who Persists with Field Incorporation?

Against this backdrop, although tasks for residue removal and field incorporation have been assigned to every village, they have proved difficult to implement. ‘Farmers don’t have to spend money, but they’re not willing to do it either,’ Hu Shunyi sums up.

The strictness of crop residue burning bans varies across regions. Among the farmers we met on this trip, most had reverted to burning after dealing with the hassle of field incorporation or residue removal. A minority had always simply burned it off; even during the strictest ban periods, they would just burn it in secret.

Grassroots authorities have gradually adjusted their strategies in response. Ultimately, before the spring planting season each year, a two-day window is still allocated. Farmers are notified in advance and permitted to clear their fields by burning stubble, and the local environmental committees (township-level environmental protection offices) look the other way for those two days. ‘Who would dare stop the people from farming?’

Rumour has it that state-owned farms are still sticking with field incorporation, but private farmers all choose to burn. We hoped to find farmers who recognised the benefits of field incorporation and still practised it voluntarily, yet we met not a single one on this trip.

This is rather perplexing: crop residue field incorporation has been heavily promoted as a public good that benefits both the nation and its people, enhancing soil fertility, sequestering carbon, cutting emissions, and boosting yields and income… Yet farmers remain unimpressed. In their view, even with thorough deep ploughing, field incorporation does not increase yields; they still need to apply the same amount of fertiliser and pesticide (or even more). If the ploughing job is poorly executed, the seedlings won’t even emerge.

In short, crop residue field incorporation has yielded no agricultural benefits for them, the subsidies never reach their pockets, and it has only left them with a mountain of headaches.

Moreover, the volume and characteristics of crop residue differ across crops. ‘Soybean residue is minimal, so field incorporation isn’t a problem. But corn is different; the stalks are too thick and must be burned. Otherwise, corn borers will overwinter inside them, leading to a massive pest outbreak the following year,’ summed up a farmer in Fuyuan.

Research shows that the rapid expansion of corn cultivation in Northeast China over the past two decades is tied to the massive importation of soybeans following China’s accession to the WTO. Domestic soybeans could not compete, leading farmers to switch to the more profitable corn crop. This shift has further exacerbated the challenges surrounding crop residue field incorporation.

Those still practising crop residue field incorporation are known only through scattered village accounts. Either their land borders major roads or urban areas, where strict bans make burning impossible, or they have the connections to claim subsidies. Since the subsidies are paid to machine operators rather than growers, these individuals are invariably large-scale farmers who own heavy machinery and contract vast tracts of land.

West of Bin County, we heard villagers recounting the business tactics of one such large-scale farmer. He had established a grain cooperative, leasing vast plots from multiple households to cultivate crops like corn and soybeans. For the past two or three years, he has continuously practised crop residue field incorporation through deep ploughing, a practice that even earned him coverage in local media.

To the villagers, the grower’s insistence on deep ploughing is merely a vehicle for securing subsidies. For operators of this scale, eligible subsidies are numerous, creating a winner-takes-all dynamic. They tally it up: subsidies for crop residue field incorporation; for corn-soybean rotation; for wide-ridge planting; and for heavy farm machinery—”it’s all subsidised by the state”: rice transplanters, harvesters… “They have “connections” and know exactly where to apply.”

However, not all subsidies actually reach the intended recipients. In a village in Hulan District we visited, the machinery cooperative has already ground to a halt. During land preparation and ridge formation, the cooperative hires operators, supplies equipment, and fronts the costs for fuel and labour. Village party secretary Guo Quanshan says the district’s deep ploughing subsidies have been perpetually delayed. After covering these outlays for five or six years, the cooperative has accumulated arrears running into several million yuan. Even if farmers still wanted to incorporate crop residue, there is no one left to provide the service.

We just want to burn it.

“Just write that the folks in the Northeast have spoken: we just want to burn it!” After talking with us, more than one farmer or village party secretary made this bold statement.

Chen Jie recalls the spectacle of the whole village turning out to burn crop residue: following the weather forecast, the village would announce a set time. If they only had one day, every household would round up a few extra relatives to help out, lighting torches and setting the fields alight with the wind at their backs. If they wanted to speed things up, they would simply pour oil on the residue to make it burn faster.

Yet Guo Quanshan also remembers how, one year, strong winds caused a crop residue fire in a neighbouring village to spiral out of control. The flames swept into the settlement, killing three people.

In late April this year, burning crop residue near Harbin Airport disrupted take-offs and landings, causing widespread flight delays. In another incident, a crop residue fire in Jilin “burned bright red”, halting train services and resulting in the detention of the villagers involved. Real-time air pollution data and satellite monitoring also show that several cities across Northeast China experienced severe pollution this spring due to crop residue burning.

Several village party secretaries, thoroughly exhausted by crop residue burning, also agree that it is better addressed through guidance than prohibition. “The stricter the ban, the more anxious people become, and the more they resort to burning in secret.” The result is that, fearing they will miss the spring planting window, farmers burn the residue chaotically, like headless flies, which poses a serious risk during windy weather. Burning is now permitted, but must follow unified directives from higher authorities. Knowing it will not delay their own planting schedules has left farmers feeling far more at ease.

But will all the touted benefits of crop residue field incorporation — loosening the soil, replenishing organic matter, and breathing new life into the black earth — simply go up in smoke with a single fire? The lessons from a decade of crop residue field incorporation are far from fully drawn.

After our trip to the north-east, Foodthink travelled south to the North China Plain, where we encountered a markedly different story around crop residue field incorporation. These regional variations in crop residue management highlight the complex realities of farming, the profound impact of policy, and the difficult manoeuvrings farmers must undertake when their choices are so limited. We welcome your comments below; please share your own observations on how crop residue is managed in your area.

– This is Foodthink’s 808 th original article –

Hu Shunyi, Sister Chen, and Guo Quanshan in this article are pseudonyms.

Unless otherwise stated, photographs are by the authors.

Editing: Lingyu

Layout: Minglin

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