Another season of burning bans: what is the way forward for smallholders returning straw to the field?
Autumn harvest has arrived once more, and the question of whether straw should be burned has again become a focal point of public debate. In October, several areas in Hunan saw a rise in unregulated open-air straw burning, which worsened air pollution in some regions and led to the provincial Department of Ecology and Environment summoning eight county governments for reprimands.
When we saw this news, we were visiting farms in Xianyang, Shaanxi. It was late October. Standing by the Zheng Guo Canal, the flat expanse of land stretched out as far as the eye could see. The deep brown surface of the soil was scattered with the remnants of maize straw, recently shredded and returned to the earth. In some plots, rows of tender green winter wheat seedlings had already emerged. The autumn air was crisp, and the evening sun cast long shadows. Suddenly, an acrid smell hit us. A plume of black smoke rose a few hundred metres away.
“The town leaders are going to have their salaries docked again,” said a local farmer beside me. He added that if any more fires broke out, grassroots leaders might even be suspended. He explained that this is the peak season for burning straw, and the town is cracking down hard. They hold meetings all day and have even issued red armbands to the larger farming households, mobilising them to patrol together. Yet, it remains almost impossible to prevent. That night, as we slept in the village, the smell of smoke seeped through the gaps in the window. No doubt the grassroots leaders spent another sleepless night.
The difficulty smallholders face in returning straw to the soil is a nationwide issue and a critical pain point in current anti-burning policies. Even under the pressure of national “burning bans” and round-the-clock satellite monitoring, clandestine straw burning remains common across the country.
I. Why smallholders find it hard to return straw
Furthermore, to accelerate straw decomposition and control pests and diseases, there is a need for increased inputs of chemicals—such as pesticides and straw decomposition agents—as well as more labour, which drives up production costs for smallholders. The author concludes that the ban on straw burning is accelerating the pace at which smallholders are exiting land cultivation.
An article in the *Farmers’ Daily* in 2022 stated: “The primary issue is the reluctance of smallholders to return straw to the soil, particularly in cold regions and areas with a tight turnaround between crops.” An industry insider providing agricultural technical services in the Northeast told us that state-run farms perform well in returning straw, partly because they respond actively to policy requirements and partly because they have the supporting machinery. In contrast, most of the opposition to returning straw found on social media comes from smallholders. He believes the crux of the problem is that ordinary people lack the machinery required to facilitate the process.
“There is another issue: smallholders in the Northeast harvest later, and the ground freezes shortly after, making it impossible to return the straw. State-run farms harvest earlier, which is linked to the crop varieties they plant. Some areas prefer varieties with longer maturation periods, meaning harvest cannot be too early. This delay prevents subsequent field operations from taking place on time. Straw decomposition agents are also unsuitable for the Northeast because the ground freezes immediately after ploughing,” he said.
When local governments formulate policies for straw return, they primarily consider using machinery to achieve it. Consequently, local financial support is mostly directed towards “subsidising equipment” and a strategy of “prioritising large-scale operations while overlooking the small.”
On one hand, some local governments focus on building demonstration projects, distributing funds in the form of bonuses. These demonstration projects are typically large farms with large-scale land transfers, which have nothing to do with smallholders.
On the other hand, in terms of subsidy methods, funds for straw return are mostly directed towards supporting infrastructure, machinery, and the operators responsible for the work. For example, in the grain-producing province of Heilongjiang, straw return subsidies in 2023 were limited to “machinery owners, cooperatives, and other agricultural socialised service providers who have installed straw return monitors and carried out the operations.” Currently, only a few regions, such as Jiangsu Province, have regulations that distribute subsidies directly to farmers based on the actual area where straw was returned.
Given the difficulties in accessing machinery, if smallholders do not use their own machines or purchase machinery services, they are effectively unable to receive government subsidies. Straw that cannot be processed becomes waste, leading some smallholders to continue burning despite the pressure of the “burning ban.”
II. They treat straw as a treasure
Yuan Yong has been promoting straw cover and return in Jianyang, Sichuan, for over 20 years. When teaching farmers about this method, he often uses the analogy of “leaves returning to their roots”—why is forest soil so fertile? It is because leaves fall continuously year after year, becoming food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other animals in the soil. As they digest the fallen leaves, they add organic matter and nutrients to the soil, making it more friable. Yuan uses this comparison to illustrate that straw is as important to farmland as fallen leaves are to a forest—returning straw is the key to achieving high-quality soil.
In 1994, after graduating from a forestry college, Yuan Yong returned to his hometown to become a town agricultural technician. His daily work involved teaching farmers how to use chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides. Gradually, a strange phenomenon caught his attention: the more pesticides they used, the worse the pests and diseases became; the more chemical fertilisers they applied, the more impoverished and compacted the soil became.
After 15 years in the profession, Yuan participated in an organic rice cultivation project. This showed him that by changing farming methods—using chicken manure and biogas slurry to replace chemical fertilisers and pesticides—the vicious cycle could be broken. He had an epiphany: the secret lay in soil health. From then on, Yuan began studying ecological planting and collaborated with farmers to continuously refine their methods. The core technique was “no-till farming + straw cover.”
Take the common rice and oilseed rape rotation in Jianyang as an example. After sowing the oilseed rape, farmers lay rice straw between the rows. This straw acts like a cotton quilt, keeping the soil warm and moist, suppressing weed growth, and slowly decomposing and turning black over the next six months, until it crumbles into fine particles underfoot, posing no hindrance to the next rice crop. After the oilseed rape is harvested, fine remnants such as seed pods are used to cover the rice fields. The cycle then repeats.
After three years of covering, the soil becomes loose and fertile; a handful of soil can be easily picked up, revealing a clear crumb structure and the presence of earthworms. The natural fragrance of the earth returns. The yields from these fields are not inferior to those grown with conventional pesticides and fertilisers. In some cases, the yield of rice with straw cover is even higher than that of the hybrid rice grown with chemical fertilisers locally.
In years of extreme weather, the advantages of straw cover are particularly evident: the soil beneath the straw remains moist, whereas drought is the greatest risk factor for local agricultural production. “Seasonal drought has persisted here for many years, and it is becoming more frequent, longer-lasting, and more damaging,” says Yuan. When drought strikes, other fields see a drop in yield, but straw-covered fields fare much better.
Yuan explains that the key to this covering technique is the absolute necessity of no-till farming. Ideally, straw should be covered exactly as it is on-site—without shredding (except for high-density crops like rice and wheat) and without ploughing. Ploughing, he explains, can actually have side effects: once straw is turned into the soil, if it does not decompose fully in the short term, it can hinder root growth, and where straw is abundant, there is even a risk of “root burn”. Another problem with ploughing is that it destroys soil microorganisms, whereas the purpose of straw covering is to provide food and a healthy environment for microorganisms, earthworms, and other soil animals, thereby maintaining a healthy soil ecosystem. Although it may seem counterintuitive, no-till farming can achieve excellent yields through meticulous management. Covering also suppresses weeds, which in turn reduces the labour required and the use of herbicides, lessening the chemical damage to the soil. “Later on, you can just spend your time playing mahjong,” Yuan jokes.
III. Good Soil is Key to Digesting Straw
In practice, however, the slow degradation of straw and the risk of pests and diseases have become the two primary obstacles to straw return.
Lvwo Farm, located in the heart of the Guanzhong Plain in Shaanxi, has operated for ten years as an ecological farm that avoids pesticides and chemical fertilisers. The farm owner, Da Hei, who prioritises soil health, also views straw as a treasure for soil maintenance. He employs the ploughing method: during the wheat harvest, machinery is used to shred the stalks and plough them deep into the earth, where they decompose in just over a month during the summer. He has also observed that in nearby fields, straw returned years ago remains unchanged, having failed to degrade.
Why is there such a stark difference in similar environments? Da Hei believes the key lies in soil vitality.
Da Hei explained to me that the quantity and activity of soil microorganisms are crucial for the decomposition of straw. The growth of aerobic microbial communities requires appropriate air and humidity, which depends on a healthy soil aggregate structure. If soil relies too heavily on chemical fertilisers, the destruction of this aggregate structure leads to compaction and hardness, depriving microorganisms of a suitable environment. The application of pesticides further disrupts the microbial balance, preventing straw from decomposing effectively. Straw that is not converted by microbes can harbour pathogen eggs, leading to pest outbreaks; in anaerobic environments with poor ventilation, the straw may even mould. Even the application of bio-inoculants to accelerate degradation often fails, as these foreign microorganisms may struggle to survive in poor soil conditions, making the effects short-lived within a single season.
In contrast, healthy soil has a distinct, soft, and breathable aggregate structure with a rich microbial community. In such soil, straw is typically decomposed quickly, further enhancing soil nutrients and structure and creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.
Another reason farmers oppose straw return is the fear that returning straw to the field will trigger a pest explosion.
Whether straw return inevitably leads to an increase in pests is currently a subject of academic debate. Take the question of whether “maize straw return exacerbates pests and diseases” as an example. Research by Li Tianjiao and others from the National Agricultural Technology Extension Service Centre found that no-till straw mulching increased the damage caused by the maize borer to spring maize in Heilongjiang. However, other studies found that in the dryland maize-growing regions of Shanxi, although straw mulching allowed the maize borer to overwinter safely, it also slowed the growth of maize seedlings. This hindered the adult overwintering generation from laying eggs, ultimately reducing the number of eggs laid and resulting in a lower infestation rate in no-till mulched fields compared to conventional fields.
Like Da Hei, Yuan Yong emphasises the avoidance of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. He believes that chemical inputs damage soil microorganisms, leading to a decline in soil vitality and buffering capacity, and causing ecological imbalance. When lecturing farmers, he repeatedly stresses that the core of agriculture is soil health—or more accurately, the health of the soil’s living organisms.
This highlights a contradiction in soil improvement: digesting straw requires healthy soil, yet the compacted, impoverished soils that most need straw return to improve are precisely those lacking the capacity to digest it. Improving such soil requires a longer period of “nursing the land”, a process that is not easily embraced by smallholders who view agriculture primarily as a means of survival.
IV. Tailoring to Local Conditions and Individual Needs
For the smallholders served by Yuan Yong, or farms like Da Hei’s, which adopt entirely ecological planting, straw provides multiple benefits: improved soil, natural fertiliser, weed suppression, and drought resistance… Conventional smallholders, however, purchase external agricultural inputs to solve these problems, and thus view straw as a nuisance that costs time and money to manage.
How can we encourage smallholders to return straw to the field? We must start with the comprehensive benefits of straw and help farmers calculate the economic bottom line.
The Yunnan Sili Ecological Alternative Technology Centre (hereafter the ‘Sili Centre’) is an environmental organisation specialising in the research and promotion of eco-friendly agricultural techniques. Since 2014, it has been promoting the comprehensive utilisation of crop straw across Yunnan Province. Like Yuan Yong, Sili believes that restoring soil ecology through appropriate technical solutions can enable smallholder farmers to reduce their spending on inputs, thereby lowering costs and increasing efficiency.
Dr Li Chunliang, the project lead at the Sili Centre, has visited a wide range of climatic zones, terrains, and cropping regions across Yunnan. Having spent over a decade promoting straw incorporation techniques to farmers, he summarises the mindset of conventional farmers as follows: while straw does indeed offer slow but long-lasting benefits for soil improvement, most farmers find the work too arduous and the results too slow. ‘If I’m expected to put in the labour for this, I’ll have to think twice’—farmers prioritise immediate, tangible results.
Yuan believes the ideal scenario for this technique is a household with five or six mu of land—roughly one mu per person—where the young people work in cities and the elderly farm primarily for their own consumption and to feed a few pigs, selling the remaining produce within the village.
The Jianyang Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs invites Yuan to give lectures every year. He has found that more and more smallholders have adopted this method in recent years, and it has now been promoted in at least four villages. Furthermore, more towns and farmers, seeing the benefits, have spontaneously begun covering their fields with rice and maize straw. Some village collectives are now working to find markets for these ecological agricultural products.
While this no-till straw cover technique sounds ideal, it has its limitations: returning straw to the soil still relies on manual labour, and the cost of labour in rural areas is currently very high. This makes it suitable for smallholders with around 10 mu per household, but completely unaffordable for large-scale farms. Against the backdrop of widespread rural labour loss, this model may need further refinement to adapt to new social realities. Yuan believes that returning straw to the soil is an inevitable trend for protecting soil and achieving sustainable agriculture; the key is to adopt different methods based on the land, the person, and the crop.
“Most crops grown by smallholders can be directly returned as cover. For crops with high density and limited space, the straw needs to be shredded before being returned. For crops where labour is scarce or cover is unsuitable, the straw can be fed to livestock, with the manure then returned to the soil, or composted before application,” he says.
However, as livestock farming becomes more centralised and industrialised and small-scale breeders exit the market, the traditional sight of integrated crop and livestock farming in the countryside is disappearing. When farmers no longer keep livestock, their motivation to utilise straw diminishes.
Currently, large-scale land transfers are also dampening the enthusiasm of farmers to return straw to the soil. A technical service provider in the northeast described the mindset of local smallholders: because they are uncertain who will farm the land next year, and because the benefits of straw return only manifest over the long term, they are unwilling to invest the effort.
In a 2022 report, the Department of Science, Technology and Education of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs noted that straw return still faces issues such as “unclear baseline data, uncertain technical effects, and unsound long-term mechanisms”. Returning straw to the soil seems simple—merely returning fallen leaves to their roots. But the implementation of policy must be adapted not only to the land but also to the people. The critical factor is whether supportive livelihood scenarios can be provided for smallholders that make straw return viable, rather than forcing the practice and effectively squeezing smallholders off their land.
Fortunately, the choice between the environment and livelihoods does not always have to be binary. The efforts of Yuan Yong and Sili give us hope. Solving the specific technical challenges of straw return and giving farmers more incentive to do so requires more frontline workers like them to continue seeking a way forward.
2 Farmers’ Daily Focus: Where does straw go when it is no longer burned on-site?
https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_20740693
3 Li Tianjiao, Zhuo Fuyan, Chen Ranran, et al. Research progress on the effect of straw returning on maize pests, diseases and weeds [J]. China Plant Protection Guide, 2022, 42(1):7. DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1672-6820.2022.01.006.
4 Institute of Earth Environment et al. reveal that returning straw to the soil helps increase grain yield and soil carbon storage
https://www.cas.cn/syky/202402/t20240220_5005755.shtml
5 Notice on Further Clarifying the Subsidy Policy for the Comprehensive Utilisation of Straw in Heilongjiang Province for 2023
https://www.hlj.gov.cn/hlj/c107856/202402/c00_31708701.shtml
Editor: Wang Hao