Another “Ban on Open Burning” Season: Where Is the Way Forward for Smallholder Straw Incorporation?
As autumn harvest returns once more, the question of whether straw “should be burned” is back in the public spotlight. In October, uncontrolled open-air burning of crop residue across parts of Hunan surged, worsening air pollution in some areas and prompting the Provincial Department of Ecology and Environment to summon eight county-level governments for formal talks.
When we saw the news, we were visiting farms in Xianyang, Shaanxi. It was late October, and standing beside the Zhengguo Canal, we could see the flat, open stretches of farmland spreading out before us. On the dark brown soil lay scattered stubble from freshly mulched maize straw. In some fields, neat rows of tender green winter wheat seedlings had already begun to appear. The autumn air was clear and cool; the setting sun cast long shadows. Suddenly, a choking smell swept over us. A column of black smoke was rising from several hundred metres away.
“The township leaders are in for another pay deduction,” said a local farmer standing beside us. If another fire was spotted, he explained, grassroots officials could even face suspension. “It’s straw-burning season, so the township is cracking down hard. They hold meetings all day long and have handed out red patrol armbands to the big landholders, getting them to help with rounds too. But you simply can’t keep up with every spot.” That night, we slept in the village, and the acrid smell of smoke and fire seeped in through the window cracks. Those local officials were surely lying awake another night.
Smallholders’ difficulty with straw incorporation is a nationwide problem and lies at the heart of the current ban on open burning. Even under the pressure of the nationwide “ban on open burning” and round-the-clock satellite surveillance, cases of unauthorised straw burning remain widespread across the country.
I. Why Small Farmers Struggle with Straw Incorporation
In addition, the need to accelerate straw decomposition and control pests and diseases calls for greater use of agrochemicals such as composting agents, along with more labour, further raising production costs for smallholders. The author concluded that the ban on open burning has accelerated smallholders’ withdrawal from farming.
A 2022 report in Farmers’ Daily noted: “The main issue is that smallholders are unwilling to incorporate straw, especially in cooler regions and in areas with tight crop-rotation windows.” An industry insider who provides agricultural services in northeast China told us that state-owned farms have managed incorporation relatively well, partly because they actively respond to policy requirements and have the necessary machinery, while most of the opposition to incorporation voiced on online media comes from smallholders. He said the real difficulty there was that ordinary farmers lacked the machinery needed for incorporation.
“There is another problem,” he said. “In the northeast, smallholders harvest late, and once the harvest is done the ground has already frozen — there is no way to incorporate the straw. State farms harvest earlier, which relates to the varieties they grow. Some regions have a tradition of planting longer-maturing varieties, so the harvest cannot begin too early, and a late harvest means the next round of field operations cannot be carried out on time. Straw-degrading microbial agents are not suitable in the northeast either, because the ground freezes as soon as you finish tilling.”
When local governments formulate straw-incorporation policies, they think primarily in terms of using machinery to achieve incorporation, and funding directions tend to follow the logic of “subsidising equipment” and “targeting large operations while overlooking smallholders”.
On one hand, some local governments focus on building demonstration projects, disbursing funds in the form of grants. These demonstration projects are large-scale farms set up on consolidated land, and have nothing to do with smallholders.
On the other hand, in terms of subsidies, straw-incorporation funding is directed mainly at supporting ancillary equipment, farm machinery, and the machinery operators who carry out the work. For instance, in 2023, Heilongjiang, a major grain-producing province, restricted its straw-incorporation subsidies to “machinery-owning households, cooperatives and other agricultural socialised service providers that have installed a straw-incorporation monitoring device and carried out incorporation work.” At present, only a few regions, such as Jiangsu Province, stipulate that subsidies should be paid to farmers based on their actual incorporated area.
However, given the machinery access difficulties faced by some smallholders, if they neither use machinery themselves nor purchase machinery services, they are effectively unable to receive government incorporation subsidies. Unprocessed straw then becomes waste, which is why some smallholders choose to burn it despite the pressure of “the ban on open burning”.
II. They Treat Straw as Treasure
Yuan Yong has been promoting straw-mulch incorporation in Jianyang, Sichuan, for over twenty years. When teaching farmers about straw incorporation, he often invokes the image of “leaves returning to their roots” — why is the soil beneath a forest so fertile? Because year after year, leaves fall continuously, becoming food for microorganisms, earthworms and other creatures in the soil. They nibble and digest the fallen leaves, adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil and making it looser and more porous. Yuan Yong uses this analogy to explain that straw is as vital to farmland as fallen leaves are to a forest — returning straw to the soil is the key to building high-quality soil.
In 1994, Yuan Yong graduated from a forestry college and returned to his hometown, becoming a township agricultural technician whose daily work was teaching farmers how to use chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Gradually, a peculiar pattern caught his attention: the more pesticides were applied, the worse pests and diseases became; the more chemical fertilisers were used, the more barren and compacted the soil grew.
After fifteen years in the profession, Yuan Yong joined an organic rice-growing project. It showed him that by changing farming practices — substituting chicken manure and biogas slurry for chemical fertilisers and pesticides respectively — the vicious cycle could be broken. He had an epiphany: the secret lay in soil health. From then on, Yuan Yong devoted himself to ecological cultivation, working with farmers to continuously refine their methods. The single most essential technique among them was no-till straw mulching — no-till soil management combined with straw mulching.
Take the rice–oilseed rape rotation common in Jianyang as an example. After sowing oilseed rape, farmers lay rice straw between the rows. Like a quilt, this straw insulates the soil and locks in moisture while suppressing weed growth. Over the following six months it slowly decomposes and darkens, until it crumbles into fine particles underfoot, leaving absolutely no hindrance to the next season’s rice planting. Once the oilseed rape is harvested, the fine residues — oilseed rape hulls and other small fragments — are spread directly over the paddy fields. And so the cycle continues, year after year.
After three years of mulching, the soil becomes loose and fertile. You can easily scoop up a generous handful by hand and see the soil aggregate structure and earthworms. The rich fragrance of healthy earth returns, too. Yields in these fields are no less than those achieved under conventional pesticide-and-fertiliser regimes. In some cases, rice grown under straw mulch even outyields local hybrid rice grown with chemical fertilisers.
In years of extreme weather, mulched fields demonstrate their particular advantage: the soil beneath straw mulch stays moist, while drought is the greatest risk to local agriculture. “Seasonal drought has been a persistent problem here for many years now, and it is becoming more frequent, lasting longer and causing greater damage,” Yuan Yong said. When drought strikes, he explained, other fields see reduced yields, but mulched fields fare far better.
Yuan Yong stresses that the key to this mulching technique is strict adherence to no-till practice. Straw is best left in its original form and spread in place without shredding (except for denser crops such as rice and wheat) and without ploughing. Ploughing, he explains, actually has drawbacks: once straw is turned into the soil, it decomposes incompletely in the short term, impeding crop root growth, and where straw volumes are high there is even a risk of root scorching. Ploughing creates another problem, too — it destroys soil microorganisms, whereas the whole purpose of mulching with straw is to provide food and a suitable habitat for microorganisms, earthworms and other soil creatures, thereby maintaining a healthy soil ecosystem. Although this may seem counterintuitive, through careful management a no-till system can produce excellent yields. Mulching also suppresses weeds, which in turn reduces the amount of labour and herbicides required, sparing the soil from further chemical damage. “Come the later stages, I can just kick back and play mahjong,” Yuan Yong joked.
III. Only Healthy Soil Can Truly Digest Straw
In practice, however, the difficulty of straw decomposition and the risk of pests and diseases present two pressing obstacles to incorporation.
Lüwo Farm, an ecological farm that operates without pesticides or chemical fertilisers, has been running for ten years in the heart of the Guanzhong Plain in Shaanxi. Its owner, Da Hei, places great importance on soil health and likewise treats straw as a cornerstone of soil care. He incorporates straw by ploughing: when harvesting wheat, he uses machinery to shred the straw and plough it deep into the ground, where it decomposes within just over a month in the summer. At the same time, he has noticed that in nearby fields, straw incorporated years ago still lies in its original form, showing no sign of decomposition.
Why such a stark difference in similar conditions? Da Hei believes the key lies in soil vitality.
He told me that the number and activity of soil microorganisms are critical to straw decomposition. The growth of an aerobic microbial community depends on adequate aeration and moisture, which in turn require a well-developed soil aggregate structure. When soil relies too heavily on chemical fertilisers, the breakdown of its aggregate structure leads to compaction and hardness, depriving microorganisms of a viable habitat; the application of pesticides further disrupts the microbial balance, preventing straw from being effectively decomposed. Undecomposed straw harbouring pathogens and insect eggs invites pests and diseases, and in poorly ventilated, anaerobic conditions, it can even develop mould. Even when bio-microbial agents are applied to speed up decomposition, these introduced organisms often fail to function in a degraded soil environment, and any short-term benefit is hard to sustain.
By contrast, healthy soil has a pronounced, soft, well-aerated aggregate structure teeming with a rich microbial community. Straw is often broken down within a short period, further enhancing soil nutrients and structure, and setting in motion a virtuous cycle of soil improvement.
Another reason farmers oppose straw incorporation is the fear that returning it to the soil will trigger a massive pest outbreak.
Whether incorporation necessarily leads to an increase in pests is still under debate in the academic community. Consider the question of whether maize straw incorporation exacerbates pests and diseases. Research by Li Tianjiao and colleagues at the National Agricultural Technology Extension and Service Centre found that no-till straw mulching intensified damage from Asian corn borer to spring maize in Heilongjiang. Yet other studies have shown that in the dryland maize-growing regions of Shanxi, while straw mulching allows the Asian corn borer to survive the winter, it also slows early seedling growth, which is unfavourable for oviposition by overwintering-generation adults; the result is a reduction in oviposition density, so that the damage rate from Asian corn borer in no-till mulched fields is actually lower than in conventionally tilled fields.
Like Da Hei, Yuan Yong also stresses going without pesticides and chemical fertilisers. In his view, chemical inputs harm soil microorganisms, which in turn reduces soil vitality and buffering capacity and disrupts the soil ecosystem. Whenever he teaches farmers, he always emphasises repeatedly that the core of agriculture lies in soil health — more precisely, in the health of the life within the soil.
This brings us to the paradox at the heart of soil improvement: digesting straw requires good soil, yet it is precisely the compacted, barren soils that most need straw incorporation to improve them that lack the very capacity to break it down. Rehabilitating soil demands a longer period of “nurturing the land”, and persuading smallholders who see farming as their livelihood to enter such a process is far from simple.
IV. Adapted to the Land and Tailored to the Farmer
For the smallholders Yuan Yong works with, or for a farm like Da Hei’s, where farming is entirely ecological, straw delivers multiple benefits: it improves the soil, supplies nutrients, suppresses weeds, and conserves water against drought. Conventional smallholders, by contrast, solve these problems by purchasing external agro-inputs, and so they see straw as a nuisance that demands extra labour and expense.
How can smallholders be encouraged to incorporate straw? The answer lies in the comprehensive value of straw — working out the economics for farmers.
The Yunnan Sili Ecological Alternative Technology Centre (known simply as the Sili Centre) is an environmental organisation dedicated to researching and promoting ecologically friendly agricultural techniques. Since 2014 it has been working to advance the comprehensive utilisation of straw across Yunnan Province. Like Yuan Yong, Sili believes that with sound technical solutions and the restoration of soil ecology, smallholders can cut their spending on purchased inputs and achieve cost savings and greater efficiency.
Dr Li Chunliang, the Sili Centre’s project director, has travelled through Yunnan’s diverse climate zones, terrain types and crop-growing areas, promoting straw-incorporation techniques to farmers for more than a decade. He sums up the mindset of conventional farmers this way: straw does slowly and persistently improve the soil, but most farmers say the work is simply too labour-intensive and the results come far too slowly. “If I have to put in the manpower myself, I’d need to think carefully about it” — what farmers care about are results they can see and touch, directly and immediately.
Yuan Yong believes the ideal scenario for this technique is a household with five or six mu of land — roughly one mu per person — where the younger members work away from home, the elders tend the fields, the produce is mainly for the family’s own table, a few pigs are kept, and any surplus is sold within the village.
The Jianyang Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs invites Yuan Yong to give lectures every year. He has found that in recent years more and more smallholders are learning this method; it has now spread to at least four villages. Beyond that, more townships and farmers have seen the benefits and are spontaneously spreading rice straw and maize straw as mulch for incorporation. Some village collectives are actively working to find markets for their ecologically grown produce.
This no-till straw mulching technique may sound ideal, but it comes with limitations: incorporation still relies entirely on manual labour, and in rural areas today labour costs are high. It suits smallholders with an average of around ten mu per household; large-scale farms simply cannot afford it. Against the backdrop of widespread rural labour loss, this model may need to continue evolving to adapt to changing social conditions. Yuan Yong believes that returning straw to the field is an inevitable trend for protecting soil and achieving sustainable agriculture; the key lies in adopting different methods according to the land, the people, and the crop.
“Most of a smallholder’s crops can have straw returned directly as mulch. For crops planted at high density with narrow spacing, the straw needs to be shredded before incorporation. For crops where labour is in short supply or mulching is unsuitable, the straw can be fed to livestock and the manure returned to the field, or composted first and then incorporated,” he said.
However, as the livestock industry becomes more concentrated and scaled up and small-scale breeders exit, the once-familiar sight of integrated crop-livestock farming in the countryside is fading. When farmers no longer raise livestock, their motivation to make use of straw drops even further.
Large-scale land transfers are also dampening farmers’ willingness to incorporate straw across the country. The northeast agricultural services practitioner mentioned earlier described the mindset of northeast smallholders thus: because it is uncertain who will be farming the land next year, and straw incorporation only pays off over the long term, smallholders are unwilling to invest.
In a 2022 report, the Department of Science and Education of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs noted that straw incorporation still faces the challenges of “unclear baseline data, uncertain technical efficacy, and insufficient long-term mechanisms.” Returning straw to the soil looks simple — just leaves returning to their roots. But putting policy into practice requires not only adapting to local conditions but also to the people themselves. The crux is whether a supportive livelihood context suited to straw incorporation can be created for smallholders, rather than forcing incorporation in a way that merely pushes them off their land.
Fortunately, the choice between the environment and livelihood is not always a forced either-or. The efforts of Yuan Yong and the Sili Centre give us hope. Solving the practical technical challenges of straw incorporation and giving farmers greater incentive to do it will require more frontline practitioners like them to keep seeking solutions.
2 Farmers’ Daily Focus: Where does straw really go once it can no longer be burned on the spot?
https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_20740693
3 Li Tianjiao, Zhuo Fuyan, Chen Ranran, et al. “Research Progress on the Impact of Straw Incorporation on Corn 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 and collaborators reveal that straw incorporation helps boost grain yields and increase soil carbon storage
https://www.cas.cn/syky/202402/t20240220_5005755.shtml
5 Notice on Further Clarifying the 2023 Comprehensive Straw Utilisation Subsidy Policy for Heilongjiang Province
https://www.hlj.gov.cn/hlj/c107856/202402/c00_31708701.shtml
Editor: Wang Hao