Who Dragged Down the Standards of “High-Standard Farmland”?
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer in Meishan, watched the village’s rice paddies go unharvested and shook his head in anguish. But those fields were not his – nor did they belong to the villagers any longer. They belonged to “the boss” – a large-scale land lessee from outside the area. At the end of 2024, several hundred mu of land across a number of village teams had been collectively transferred and converted into “high-standard farmland” (hereafter, “high-standard fields”).
Yet in the villagers’ eyes, these neglected plots could hardly be called high-standard. It was not until after the Spring Equinox that the boss had hurriedly sown the rice seeds. Zhao recalled the scene as he remembered it: handfuls of seed, sown far too densely, were tossed straight into unflooded fields without raising seedlings first – direct seeding, as though the grain were free. He could not understand it: what on earth could possibly grow from that?
When autumn came, the harvest was actually better than the villagers had expected. They speculated that perhaps the boss had chosen a good variety, but more likely he had used far too much chemical fertiliser and herbicide. “Drones just flying right over the fields,” one villager mimed.
Unfortunately, relentless October rains delayed the harvest. The boss did not seem nearly as worried about the crop as the small family farmers would have been. With much of the rice already gone mouldy before their eyes, it was not until 8 November that a crawler tractor from out of town finally rumbled into the waterlogged, sodden paddies. Some of the lodged rice, heads bowed low, was beyond saving by then. A few plots had not been harvested at all. The boss’s parting words: whatever we cannot get in, just pick up yourselves.
The grain they managed to gather, many dared only feed to their chickens.
Aside from the lax management, Zhao Lishun also felt the field bunds had been raised far too high. He had pointed, aching, at a patch of cracked, waterlogged land. The official description called high-standard fields “contiguous with complete facilities”, yet this plot, flooded beyond repair, had had its tall field bunds washed away entirely. “It’s not even a field any more!” He wanted to know why the men sent to operate the diggers had never farmed a day in their lives – why not ask the local old farmers how the land should be reshaped?
His observations stood a world away from the stated goals of high-standard fields – “level terrain, contiguous plots, complete facilities, full farm infrastructure, fertile soil, a sound ecological environment, strong resilience to natural disasters, drought- and flood-proof, with high and stable yields – all suited to modern agricultural production and management”.
Central Document No. 1 has, over the years, repeatedly called for accelerating the construction of high-standard farmland, treating it as an essential requirement for food security. This safeguard operates on two levels: first, increasing grain output by raising the quality of arable land; second, promoting large-scale farming through land transfer, to address the pressing question of who will till the soil in future.
To date, China has built one billion mu of high-standard farmland – two-thirds of the country’s 1.546 billion mu of permanent basic farmland. In April 2025, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee issued a document aiming to convert all qualifying permanent basic farmland into high-standard farmland by 2035.
Yet the “high standards” written into those red-headed official documents had devolved into “low standards” at the field’s edge. The soils and irrigation systems left behind by the redesign did not necessarily meet practical needs, and sometimes even became a reason for farmers to abandon their land – an absurdity now playing out across many regions.
The land transfer that accompanied the redevelopment was also pulling villagers further and further away from their fields. In several villages around Chengdu, the village committee called on each production brigade to pool the villagers’ plots, which were then transferred in bulk through the village collective cooperative to a single “lead enterprise”. On one hand, the lead enterprise paid villagers a land-transfer fee; on the other, it sought suitable operators to take on the fields. Some lamented watching their own plots transformed beyond recognition after transfer, while others, enticed by rents of 600–800 yuan per mu, embraced the change with open arms.
But merging small fields into large ones does not necessarily mean higher yields or greater efficiency. Whoever ends up running the large fields, once they find that farming is neither easy nor profitable and walk away, the cost of breaking those large fields back up and returning them to smallholders is enormous. So who is to answer for the land and for food security – and to what extent has the redevelopment truly served the purpose of “high-standard” cultivation?
I. Merging Small Fields, Spoiling Good Soil
Four years after the high-standard fields were completed – by 2025 – the village collective in Village B near Chengdu had to hire workers to re-level the land: over 300 mu of rice paddies at more than 300 yuan per mu. Nearly a hundred thousand yuan went in one go, and the spring planting was delayed. The village secretary said this was already the second round of conversion since the initial high-standard build. “Before the second one, it was even worse – a puddle here, a puddle there.”
Xu Runtian has spent years doing agricultural extension work in Sichuan. In his view, unlike the sandy loam of the plains, much of Sichuan’s hilly terrain is clay, with smaller pore spaces, making it harder to level. It had taken farmers years of careful tending to coax the land into those gently undulating, well-graded surfaces. High-standard fields were simply too vast for an excavator operator to achieve such a plane “by feel” – far from realistic.
In Village A, where pears were planted, more than 30 mu of the thousand mu of sloping land had been stuck in this waterlogged, undrainable state for a long time. Zhang Xiaoqin, who works in the pear orchard, said the water was even worse in summer. The boss had dug extra channels and workers had tried every method to drain the area, yet the pear trees in that small patch had still drowned, and no machinery could get in. Before the redevelopment, this had been the spot where the village’s rice grew best.
Xu Runtian visited several villages across Sichuan and found that, with the small-to-large-field mergers now in place, anyone wanting to farm had to dig new drainage ditches after the high-standard conversion, or water simply could not be drained away. If the ditching was not handled by the company that had leased the fields, the work fell to the village collective or individual villagers.
Field merging often went hand in hand with soil conversion. Under the 2013 National Plan for High-Standard Farmland Construction, when reshaping plots, protecting soil fertility came first: the fertile topsoil layer had to be stripped and carefully replaced; the farmland’s effective soil-layer thickness had to reach at least 50 cm, and the cultivation-layer thickness at least 20 cm. “Effective soil-layer thickness” has also long been a basic assessment criterion for the acceptance of high-standard fields. In practice, however, meeting the target proved very difficult.
Several village party secretaries and large-scale growers in Zhijin County, Guizhou, had told Foodthink: during the high-standard conversion, excavators turned the good soil under and brought raw subsoil to the surface, and the 3,000 jin (≈ 500 g) of organic matter per mu that was to be spread by regulation was nowhere to be seen. “It destroyed the little good soil the ordinary people had left. You cannot grow rice, you cannot grow maize. There is nothing to do but let it go to waste, wait for the weeds to take over,” one village party secretary said, grief-stricken. They felt the policy’s original intent was sound, but it had gone sour in execution.
II. Engineering Mindset Meets Farming, More Technology or More Corruption?
In Meishan, Zhao Lishun’s village also had two lift irrigation stations built in the spring of last year. But he had never once seen water come out of them. At the worst of the spring drought, villagers still had to pump water from the river themselves – they even burned out an electric pump.
In mid-June 2024, Henan was hit by a severe drought. Media teams randomly visited ten villages in Xiayi County and found that the motorized wells in the high-standard fields generally would not yield a drop. Some lacked electricity; in others, the pipes had not been properly buried. Desperate for water, farmers had no choice but to tear the smart irrigation equipment off the wells and revert to old ways of pumping water onto their fields; some even charged the wells using electric tricycles, managing to irrigate barely four mu in two days. After more than ten consecutive dry days, it was a heavy rain in the end that broke the impasse.
A kiwifruit grower in Shaanxi had also had drip irrigation fitted to his orchard as part of a high-standard conversion. This was the third time the orchard’s flood irrigation had been overhauled – the first under a Water Resources Bureau “water-saving irrigation project”, the next under a National Development and Reform Commission “eco-orchard project”. “We joke that you’d better hurry up and install it, then the villagers will tear it right out, and you can just go and collect your payment,” he told Foodthink. He explained that the key to drip irrigation is pressurising and filtering the water source, yet the contractors simply ran pipes from the open channel to draw water. “It’s like wanting to inflate a tyre but not having an air pump.” Those armchair-engineered pipes were ultimately scrapped.
One of the stated goals of high-standard field conversion is to make harvests drought- and flood-proof, but in reality, shoddy construction may leave farmers even more vulnerable when weather turns against them.
In recent years, cases of corner-cutting and fields left to go to weeds have erupted time and again in high-standard farmland projects across the country, and all the examples above point to one possibility: the inherent space for corruption in a top-down, multi-layer-subcontracting project-based funding system.
According to survey data disclosed by the People’s Political Consultative Conference Daily, the average construction cost per mu of high-standard farmland nationwide in 2020 was 3,046 yuan, exceeding 5,000 yuan in some hilly and mountainous areas. In the memories of Xu Runtian and the old village secretary of Village A, the conversion funds that township leaders had let slip were even higher than that.
Binhai County in Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province, invested a total of 349 million yuan in 115,000 mu of high-standard farmland in 2022. The following year, CCTV’s 315 Gala reported that the concrete pipes used for water diversion and irrigation in the local high-standard fields commonly suffered from exposed reinforcement bars and cracks, failing to meet national standards. The cause: to cut costs, contractors selected cheap, inferior non-standard-specification pipes, then bought a few lengths of national-standard pipe for the construction supervisor to inspect.
In 2024, reporters from Yicai compiled reports from at least 12 provinces that flagged irregularities in high-standard farmland construction, including fields planned within forest and grassland areas, tender documents laced with conditions restricting potential bidders, agricultural wells lacking a pre-construction hydrological survey, falsified reports to defraud fiscal funds, and fields left idle and abandoned.
These construction problems were passed along like a hot potato, ultimately becoming a headache for grassroots governance. In Village A, the retired old village secretary said the project had dragged on for years before anyone signed off on acceptance. “We tried to hand it over, but nobody would take it. The contractors hadn’t finished drawing their money. Every corner of the village was making a fuss – ‘This isn’t done right, that isn’t done right, it’s a half-finished project’ – and the government didn’t seem willing to accept it either.” After the fact, the contractors came back to the village for patch-up repairs.
According to a study by Guo Xiaoming and other scholars, across the country there is a widespread disconnect between the parties responsible for building, using and maintaining high-standard farmland, and once the builders depart, the upkeep responsibility is often “left stranded” with the village committee.
The study noted that after high-standard fields are completed, acceptance is generally handled by the county-level agriculture and rural affairs department. Assets created – farm roads, water-conservancy facilities and the like – are then transferred to the township government, with property rights confirmed and handed over to the village collective on the basis of the project’s actual state of construction. The study also cited a figure from a State Council audit report: in 2023, across 16 provinces and 46 counties in rural China, 2,761 agricultural infrastructure projects built at a cost of 6.929 billion yuan had all been left idle due to problems such as missing supporting facilities and prioritising construction over maintenance.
The aforementioned respondent from a central province, well acquainted with the land-and-resource system, also told Foodthink that many high-standard project payments within the province were still being withheld, while numerous officials and contractors who had taken part in the projects had been taken away by the relevant authorities for investigation.
After observing the operating mechanisms of high-standard fields in several regions, rural affairs researcher Chen Jingjing concluded: they may appear to have standards, procedures and oversight, but in reality everything is theatrical – everyone is simply “performing”, playing to a prescribed set of correct, modern expectations. During fieldwork, Foodthink found that at the grassroots level – whether village party secretary, brigade chief or ordinary villager – there was no means of correcting this engineered “performance”.
III. Is Scaling Up the Key to Agricultural Efficiency?
Yet large-scale farming does not necessarily improve overall agricultural efficiency.
Village B is the only village among the several Foodthink surveyed that, even after high-standard conversion, still farms and manages its land through the village collective economy. The village has ample land – over 5,000 mu – and a resident labour force of six or seven hundred people. The village secretary has served in the role for twelve years. Four years into collective management, the secretary laid out the planting accounts since the high-standard conversion.
At the end of 2021, the village submitted 800 mu of farmland for high-standard conversion, planting two grain crops a year. “Now the plots are bigger, we figured mechanised farming would save money and labour, and make it easier to find workers,” the village secretary explained.
But once the land was no longer under the household responsibility system, less manual labour was needed – yet it demanded far more from growers in terms of field-management skills. In 2021, 550 mu of soybeans under collective management were simply too vast to monitor properly; the first crop of soybeans was hit by pests, and not a single harvest was brought in.
On top of that, because the excavators had stripped away the fertile topsoil – as described earlier – the 350 mu of rice ran at a complete loss, yielding only about 200 jin (≈ 100 kg) per mu. Under the same drought conditions, villagers’ own rice – its topsoil undamaged by the conversion and managed with more care – could yield 800 jin per mu.
Complex farming is a test of management and experience. Indeed, in the four years before 2021, Village B had also brought in outside operators to lease land for lotus-root ponds. After three or four years, however, the operators’ earnings no longer justified the 600 yuan per mu in rent, and they “ran off”.
From 2023 the village collective adjusted its management model – handing field management back to the production teams. Each team leader organised the work, paid 30 yuan per mu in management fees plus a bonus based on yield. That autumn, rice yields reached 800–900 jin per mu.
The planted area has grown year by year, yet the secretary candidly admitted that even in the best season, a thousand mu under this model earns no more than a little over 300,000 yuan. One can imagine that, for outsiders armed with millions of yuan hoping to find business opportunities in the countryside, the rate of return on capital within agriculture’s logic is simply no match for industry or the service sector.
It is worth noting that Village B also applied for large-scale planting subsidies on nearly two thousand mu of land: 200 yuan per mu for rice, 350 yuan for maize–soybean intercropping, and 200–300 yuan per mu for wheat. These subsidies accounted for the other half of the profit from grain growing.
“I rather like earning state subsidies,” the village secretary confided to us – words that spoke volumes.
IV. Who Gets Left Holding the Bag – the Boss, the Villagers, or Someone Else?
More than one villager mentioned that the few bosses at the fruit company were always “quarrelling” at year’s end, even to the point where shareholders had to front money to pay the workers’ wages. It is hard to say anyone is actually making a profit.
When no suitable boss is willing to take on a lease, the lead enterprise must continue paying villagers their land-transfer fees.
In Village C, according to Xu Runtian, roughly a year or two after the high-standard conversion was completed, the land was handed back to the village committee. To this day, the lead enterprise still pays – but ever more sluggishly. “Whether I’ll get paid or not, I honestly don’t know any more,” one old man quipped. “At first, when the land was first leased, no delay – the money came through that same year. The second year, it arrived midway through the season. Now? It’s simply gone up in smoke.”
As for the boss in Meishan who harvested for three days and then left, with many fields still bare and unplanted – Xu Runtian said he had seen similar cases in other villages where someone sowed seed and simply walked away, abandoning the crop altogether. His assessment: the money from selling paddy rice barely covers the cost of hiring harvesters.
Running in parallel with the degradation of the high-standard projects is the erosion of villages’ capacity for collective stewardship.
On one hand, the merger of small fields into large ones has erased old field-bund boundaries and plot layouts; some parcels have been taken up by new roads and water infrastructure and can no longer be returned to villagers. Xu Runtian has witnessed this scene in quite a few places: after conversion, high-standard fields with nobody to take them over – unless there is a capable local figure who specifically organises and coordinates the effort, villagers find it very difficult to resume cultivation on their own.
Nearby Village D, situated close to the edge of the urban built-up area, was notified in the very year of its high-standard conversion that the land might be requisitioned for development. As a result, no company dared to lease it; villagers never received a single land-transfer fee, yet the land has been left fallow for over three years.
A villager who later joined the Village D committee recalled that before the fields were recultivated, weeds had grown so thick they stood taller than a person’s head. Under the state’s policy prohibiting farmland from being left fallow, the committee led villagers in clearing weeds, used an excavator to dig new channels through the middle of the large consolidated field, and in 2024 laid new drainage pipes. The re-conversion cost over a hundred thousand yuan.
In Village A, meanwhile, the pear orchard boss’s contract expires in three years. Will the boss leave? How will the land be divided back up? “They (the lead enterprise) will certainly have to find a solution – give us an answer,” Zhang Xiaoqin said.
On the other hand, when some villagers have grown accustomed to working for wages while “sitting and collecting” land-transfer fees, rifts and divides have also taken root across generations and among villagers with differing interests.
The three villages around Chengdu visited by Foodthink – A, C and D – issued their first tender documents as early as 2017 or 2018, making them among the first areas in Sichuan to undergo high-standard conversion. In Village A, when the newly built field bunds began to crack, villagers no longer volunteered to repair them. “We’re not farming anyway.” In Village C, after the lead enterprise threw in the towel, the village committee lacked the capacity to organise large-scale production, and some of the unmaintained water infrastructure was simply forgotten.
Team One and Team Two of Village A had once refused to take part in the high-standard conversion; a few old men leased the land and insisted on farming it themselves. But now they are too old to work the fields any more. Everyone could see that the policy dividends had passed – no boss would come again. “The young ones blame them – ‘Why didn’t you take the lease? Why didn’t you go along with the conversion?'” the old village secretary laughed bitterly.
Villagers can see it all plainly: the labour force is dwindling, and conversion and transfer are an irreversible tide. But once the “large-field” system fails, readjusting demands a far greater cost. And the owners of the “small fields” are gradually losing their rooted farming knowledge and identity. Faced with poor soil-and-water conversion, low grain returns, and poor management, both bosses and smallholders find it all too easy to choose to abandon the land.
When high-standard fields – meant to shoulder the burden of food security – collide with the complex reality of farming, to what extent are they suited to engineering-style management? Across the long chain of operation, management and maintenance, how can corruption be rooted out, productivity gains ensured, and complex terrain such as mountains and hills accommodated? Have high-standard fields become a guarantee of food security – or simply an ATM for agricultural subsidies? As the high-standard conversion programme reaches its two-thirds mark, these questions still await a more thorough answer.
Editors: Ling Yu, Tian Le