The High-Standard Farmland I Have Seen / Farmed / Built Over the Years | Reader Comments
Foodthink Editorial
I. I. Why Is High-Standard Farmland Abandoned?
Terraced fields in the south, where natural rainfall is no problem, might still coax out a little grain. In the north — Northern Shaanxi, Gansu — you can only depend on the heavens. You could call them fields, but you absolutely would not dare classify them as basic farmland. Which official who approved such a project would dare guarantee that northern terraced fields can supply grain reliably? (IP: Ningxia)
Come and see Yunnan — mountains this enormous, and the high-standard farmland they “produced” is completely unusable. No water at all. (IP: Yunnan)
It is nothing but a money grab. The high-standard farmland in xxxx town — not a drop of water, acres of desolation. (IP: Chongqing)
Has anyone genuinely considered the differences between regions? Where we come from is all flat plain, and when irrigation is needed, some places are desperate for water yet simply cannot get any. (IP: Jiangsu) The field bunds on our high-standard farmland are four to five metres wide — from a distance they look like airport runways. Is there really any need for them to be that wide? (IP: Hunan) My hometown is in xx, Sichuan. Who decided on the “high-standard” designation, we don’t know, but the local government, eager to score political points with their superiors, had mature fruit trees felled to plant worthless crops in their place. After painstakingly nurturing a fruit and vegetable supply chain, they switched to grain — and now every single plot lies abandoned. (IP: Guangdong)
II. What Kind of “High Standard” Do Farmers Need?
The second is the “choutao” method, which is fast and allows operations to run in parallel, but tends to produce uneven soil fertility when trenches are joined. Both of these methods require a combination of manual and mechanical labour.
The third is the “quanchan” method, suitable for fully mechanised operations and highly efficient, but it exposes a great deal of raw subsoil, and restoring soil fertility is difficult.
In 2022, the national government issued the General Rules for the Construction of High-Standard Farmland (GB/T 30600-2022), setting out detailed provisions on indicators including field-plot remediation, effective soil layer depth, and cultivated-land soil productivity. Yet when it comes to land levelling, neither the General Rules nor local standard documents specify which construction method should be used.
In the comments, several readers also offered their own views on how farmland infrastructure can be built to safeguard food security while reflecting local natural and social conditions.
Ideal high-standard farmland should involve a rationally configured, locally adapted arrangement of soil, irrigation channels, roads, and other infrastructure. At its core lies working with the natural terrain – the product of a rural community’s continuous adjustment of its farmland environment over generations of farming, grounded in local knowledge. But in reality, aside from cutting corners, the greatest failing of many conversion projects is the lack of engagement with the terrain. Without understanding the topography, the soil quality, or the lives of local residents, they simply “reformat” the land.
High-standard farmland is not about making plots as large or as neat as possible; rather, on this one plot, bringing water in, retaining it, and letting it drain should all be easy, and soil fertility should be sustainable. When plots are too large, there will inevitably be uneven spots – the high spots die of drought and the low spots drown, and you end up having to put field bunds across the middle. Irrigation channels built perfectly straight and square may not match the actual terrain; when a surge of water comes through, the low spots overflow the channel while the high spots have barely any water at all. Even if you forcibly grade the surface flat, what is exposed underneath may be dead soil or even rubble. I have seen all of this during my field research.
Over three thousand unhurried years, barely three inches of soil have formed. If you disregard the terrain and the natural rhythms of cultivation, no matter how “high-standard” the farmland, you are simply depleting its productivity. (IP: Shandong)
We have a similar problem in xx city, Hunan: after the conversion, good farmland has turned into poor farmland, and poor farmland into wasteland. This year’s rice harvest may be less than half of last year’s. To those areas that have not yet been converted: whatever you do, do not plough the fertile topsoil under and bury it beneath the raw subsoil that lies below. Otherwise, the land will not recover for at least five years. Farmland conversion becomes farmland destruction. The state has invested its money; you look out over the big fields and your heart sinks, and the plan comes to nothing. (IP: Hunan)
I have noticed that the people who carry out high-standard farmland construction know nothing about farming. They blindly believe that as long as the land is levelled, it qualifies as high-standard farmland – yet after levelling, all you have is raw subsoil. Crops will never thrive on it; you have to pour in enormous amounts of farmyard manure and chemical fertiliser just to nurse the soil back. For four or five years, it is all input with no return. If a farmer tries to work it themselves, the costs are prohibitive; if they lease it out, the new tenant will not keep investing after one or two barren seasons. In the end, the land simply lies fallow. Can someone not consider the real situation? The farmland that previous generations built in harmony with hills and waterways, they call a waste of land. They spend enormous effort levelling hilltops, only to end up with nothing. (IP: Yunnan)
The best agricultural policy is to stop tinkering. (IP: Beijing)
III. Contractors, Too, Have Something to Say
Once central government special funds are released, many construction firms from the housing and transport sectors come to bid on high-standard farmland work. These construction outfits are run by fiefdom-style rogue project managers — if they don’t drag the township police station along to gang-beat villagers who refuse to cooperate on land expropriation, you should count yourself lucky. How on earth would they bother consulting the villagers before carrying out construction?\n\n If a small county-level construction firm takes on the work, the villagers will insist that you take the contract in name only, but the actual labour must be done by their own people. At that point, both the design and construction firms are deeply reluctant, because the village simply won’t build to the drawings. The specification calls for ten steps, but they stubbornly build only five. They might think it’s good enough, but the expert acceptance inspection will fail, and the design, construction, and supervision teams will all have to cooperate in producing variation documentation. The problem is that going from ten steps to five was never compliant in the first place, so producing that variation documentation is like burying a landmine not just for yourself but for the review experts too — if it ever blows up, nobody in this industry can stay.\n\n And here is the most important point of all: whether in design, construction, or supervision, the people actually responsible for this work — especially in design, whether junior technicians or project managers — don’t make much money from it. From start to finish, not a single person involved has been paid in full. How could anyone be expected to jump through so many hoops? Besides, on farmland and water-conservancy projects, the designers usually come from a land management background and the builders from a civil engineering one. Many of the smaller design institutes can’t find a single person with a water-related specialisation among their entire staff. Everything they know about irrigation was picked up by osmosis growing up in the countryside, and making the design work properly depends entirely on experience. But what use are three or five years of experience? And with longer experience comes less energy to be stationed on site working overtime all the time — it’s a catch-22. (IP: Hubei)\n\n (Replying to the above) Exactly — not a single person actually doing the work has been paid what they’re owed. (IP: Shaanxi)
I once worked on a lift irrigation station project. There was no water source — just a dry pit. The design team said to wait for rain to collect water. I said, if it’s raining and water has collected, what’s the point of pumping it up — for whom? I asked the local farmers; the old men just shook their heads. (IP: Henan)\n\n Shouldn’t high-standard farmland focus on production roads, boreholes, and ditches and channels? But no — now they impose arbitrary percentage caps: road-building can’t exceed 20 per cent, and you have to plant trees too… And then a lot of that gets squeezed out by the roads again, so they rip the trees back out and grow vegetables. (IP: Henan)\n\n (Replying to the above) Because if you don’t cap the proportions, it’s all roads. The first draft of the design plan, after going back and forth with the village, always has roads at around 50 per cent, and then it’s endless argument. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that design fees were already low, and the local government then slashes them further with a single document on local finances. (IP: Hubei)\n\n (Replying to the one before that) Anyone who can talk about the cost ratios actually knows this work inside out. (IP: Henan)\n\n The roads you can see are built well enough, but the drainage you can’t see is a disaster — and that’s not an isolated case. (IP: Heilongjiang)\n\n No one is “lowering the standard” — the standard was an engineering standard from the outset. You’re trying to build farmland that must function continuously over the long term to an engineering standard. The outcome was doomed from the start. (IP: Hunan)
IV. When Investment Becomes a Performance: How Can We Course-Correct?
If we are talking about the problems inherent in high-standard farmland construction itself, there are far too many to count. What you see in the fields and what ordinary folk grumble about is all surface. Until the underlying problems are resolved, how can you fix the surface?
1. Local governments take it far too seriously (basically all local governments are extremely attentive to the funding, because the money is all transfer payment funds, national bond funds, central and provincial funds — all hard cash! Why are they so attentive? Diverting it! How do you divert it? Set up an agricultural investment company! Make the agricultural investment company the project owner, then find a state-owned enterprise to do the construction, and the money can be used however you please?)
2. The construction units are far too professional (an agricultural investment company is essentially an investment firm — investment is what they are professional at. How could they possibly understand cultivation? Even if they were all willing to learn, could they master it in anything less than ten or twenty years?)
3. The design is far too scientific (how can you guarantee that a bunch of lads and lasses in their twenties and thirties understand farming? They don’t, so how do they design? By following the regulations, guidance documents, and circulars, of course. Some say the designers never visit the site and just draw up plans at the office using maps — on this point I want to put in a defence: they definitely do visit, but since they have no idea how to grow anything, all they can do is design according to their own ideas and plans combined with the standards. As for what the actual growers want, they do not know that, so naturally the planting ends up feeling all wrong.)
4. The construction contractors are far too professional (whether it is a private firm or a state-owned enterprise that wins the construction bid, they are extremely professional. Anyone who calls them unprofessional is the real layperson — but their expertise is not in farmland construction or cultivation needs. They are experts at cost calculation and project planning. The vast majority of state-owned or private firms calculate the profit margin, fix the commission rate, pass the work on, and never touch the actual site work themselves!)
5. The on-site construction is far too professional (the only criterion for the people actually doing the on-site work or fronting capital is that they have money and can front it. Why? Because the government diverted the funds right from the start! They may not be professional at construction, but they are very professional at calculations — cost control is nailed down perfectly, and the materials are all the cheapest possible.) (IP: Sichuan)
As a strategic investment, high-standard farmland construction is the single largest line of spending under rural revitalisation during the 14th Five-Year Plan period — the central government alone committed over 700 billion yuan, and once you add local government budgets, financial investment, and private capital, the total scale is certainly over 1 trillion yuan. The overall outlay for rural revitalisation under the 14th Five-Year Plan is 10.8 trillion. But in practice, the results have been particularly poor, and public trust has been lost.
Over these past five years I have written many words of complaint and published quite a few videos. I have even gone so far as to argue that high-standard farmland has reduced grain yields and that the annual figures on increased grain production are not real. What is more troublesome still, though, is the set of mechanisms and logic actually at work behind all this — and they are universal. On the surface there are standards, procedures, and oversight; in reality, all of it is external. Everyone is putting on a show, conforming to a set of correct, modern requirements. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ inspections are part of this same act.
High-standard farmland is one example; in other areas of rural revitalisation, especially industrial revitalisation, the situation is probably even worse. I suspect the same could be said of high-tech fields like chips and AI. The soaring of political slogans, the web of procedures and bureaucracy, and the unsavoury acquiescence of society on the ground — all of this together has given us today’s peculiar “performance” that is China. That “performance” is, of course, distorted, unnatural, and costly, yet it has become a necessity.
Can further reform solve these problems? Very hard, because you would have to touch existing interests and rules. (IP: Zhejiang)
The state has spent a fortune on high-standard farmland, department staff work themselves to death with boundless responsibility, and it has reached the point where nobody wants to do it. The people aren’t happy either. If everyone is unhappy and everyone finds it difficult, I suggest we stop doing it. Don’t call it “high-standard” anymore — just call it small-scale farmland water conservancy facilities. Focus on solving water access and getting the roads done. Leave soil fertility improvement as a separate programme. (IP: Sichuan)
V. V. Outsider Large-Scale Operators Vs. Family Farms
If it is not a local farming the land at scale but an outsider or a large corporation, they are not increasing their income through the harvest — they are there to extract large state subsidies. Not a single one of them is genuinely farming the land. (IP: Shandong)
For outsider large-scale growers who know nothing about agriculture, a loss is inevitable! Converting farmland to high standard is enormously complex — it must be tailored to the local terrain, practical and flexible, or it will only backfire. (IP: Chongqing)
We have the same thing where we come from. A large-scale land tenant planted all sorts of sorghum and soybeans, but by autumn nothing was harvested — it was just left sitting there. Some of the braver farmers gathered a bit. (IP: Shandong)
What they really want is the high-standard farmland subsidy. (IP: Guangdong)
We have rice cultivation pushed up onto the hillsides here. Outsiders took the leases. Yield per mu: a hundred jin. They are all living off state subsidies. (IP: Zhejiang)
Good farmland on hilltops? These people must be after the subsidies, surely? Local farmers say there was a dry-to-paddy conversion project — the subsidy was tens of thousands of yuan per mu. (IP: Guangxi)
Purely extracting subsidies. The conversion cost is quoted at tens of thousands of yuan per mu, but the actual cost is only a few thousand — no more than five thousand. (IP: Guangdong)
They are only in it for the subsidies. (IP: Guangxi)
They came here solely for the grants. (IP: Chongqing)
Under these circumstances, finding ways for operating entities with the capacity to organise and coordinate large-scale production to work better with small farmers — ensuring that smallholders retain a genuine say in the production process — may well be the key to sustaining abundant harvests.
My sense is that public services and market services have been placed in the wrong hands. Vast sums of public funding are channelled into engineering and infrastructure, yet the people designing it know nothing about farming, resulting in waste. Meanwhile, modern machinery such as tractors, harvesters, and drones is allocated entirely through the market, and those providers tend to prioritise serving large-scale operators. Smallholders and small farmers struggle to find mechanised services during the busy season, and even when they can, prices are far higher than what large-scale operators pay. Much of that heavy machinery is indeed purchased through government procurement, but in practice it is contracted out to private companies, and small farmers once again find it hard to access the services. In our area at least, part of the reason farmers are reluctant to farm is that mechanised services are simply inaccessible. I hope this can be improved! (IP: Zhejiang)
Policy is already shifting in response — for instance, by encouraging ‘moderate-scale operations’ at around a hundred mu. In past fieldwork, Foodthink also learned that some prefecture-level cities in Sichuan are collecting case studies of families whose income from farming at home roughly matches what they would earn working away — the family farm being one principal form of moderate-scale operation. In agriculture, bigger truly is not always better.