Who is lowering the standards for ‘high-standard farmland’?
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer in Meishan, shook his head in distress as he looked at the abandoned rice fields in his village. These fields were no longer his, nor those of his fellow villagers; they belonged to the ‘bosses’—large-scale land leaseholders from outside the region. At the end of 2024, hundreds of acres across several village teams had been consolidated through land transfer and converted into ‘high-standard farmland’ (henceforth referred to as ‘high-standard fields’).
In the eyes of the villagers, however, these poorly managed plots could hardly be called ‘high-standard’. It was only after the Spring Equinox that the operator hastily sowed the rice seeds. Zhao Lishun recalled the sowing process: dense handfuls of seeds were cast directly into the dry fields without being grown in nurseries first, thrown about as if they cost nothing. He wondered what on earth could possibly grow from that.
Come autumn, the harvest turned out better than the villagers had expected. They speculated that the operator might have chosen a superior variety, but it was more likely due to the excessive use of fertilisers and herbicides. ‘The drones just flew right over them,’ one villager gestured.
Unfortunately, relentless rain throughout October delayed the harvest. The operator did not seem as worried about the crop as the small-scale local farmers were. As much of the rice began to mould, tracked tractors from outside the region finally roared into the soft, waterlogged fields on 8 November. Some of the lodged rice, bent low to the ground, could no longer be recovered. Several plots were missed entirely. The operator left word: ‘Whatever isn’t harvested, feel free to glean for yourselves.’
Of the gleaned rice, many only dared to use it as chicken feed.
Beyond the haphazard management, Zhao Lishun felt that the field ridges had been made too high. He once pointed with heartache to a plot of land that was both cracked and waterlogged; official jargon describes high-standard fields as being ‘concentrated, contiguous, and equipped with complete facilities’, but this plot had accumulated so much water that the high ridges had collapsed. ‘It’s not even a field anymore!’ he exclaimed. He wondered why the people operating the excavators—who had never farmed a day in their lives—hadn’t asked the local veteran farmers how the land should be modified.
His observations clearly fell short of the official goals for high-standard fields: ‘land levelling, concentration and contiguity, complete facilities, supporting infrastructure, fertile soil, good ecology, and strong disaster resistance, ensuring high and stable yields regardless of drought or flood, in alignment with modern agricultural production and management’.
Over the years, the Central Document No. 1 has repeatedly called for the acceleration of high-standard field construction, viewing it as an essential requirement for guaranteeing food security. This guarantee manifests on two levels: first, increasing grain yields by improving cropland quality; and second, promoting large-scale operations through land transfer to solve the dilemma of ‘who will farm the land in the future’.
Currently, China has constructed one billion mu of high-standard fields, accounting for two-thirds of the nation’s 1.546 billion mu of permanent basic farmland. In April 2025, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee issued a document striving to convert all eligible permanent basic farmland into high-standard fields by 2035.
However, the ‘high standard’ promised in official red-headed documents has devolved into a ‘low standard’ in the fields. The modified soil and irrigation systems do not always meet actual needs, and in some cases, have even become a reason for farmers to abandon their land—an absurd scenario currently playing out in multiple regions.
The land transfer that accompanied the modifications has further alienated villagers from their land. In several villages around Chengdu, village committees urged various teams to collect the villagers’ plots, which were then transferred as a whole to a ‘leading company’ via a village collective cooperative. This leading company paid transfer fees to the villagers while seeking suitable entities to contract the land. Some villagers grieved that their land had been rendered unrecognisable after the modifications, while others embraced the change, lured by rents of 600 to 800 yuan per mu.
However, consolidating small plots into large fields does not necessarily mean increased yields or improved efficiency. Regardless of who manages the large fields, once they discover that farming is neither easy nor profitable and decide to abscond, the cost of breaking the large fields back down for smallholders is prohibitively high. In such cases, who will be responsible for the land and food security, and to what extent have the modifications actually achieved the ‘high-standard’ goal of cultivation?
I. Consolidating Small Plots into Large Fields: Turning Fertile Soil Barren
Four years after the completion of the high-standard fields, by 2025, the village collective of Village B near Chengdu was forced to hire workers to re-level the land—spending over 300 yuan per mu for 300 mu of rice fields. This sudden expenditure of nearly 100,000 yuan also delayed the spring sowing. The village secretary stated that this was already the second modification since the high-standard project. ‘It was even more frustrating before the second round—there were puddles and hollows everywhere.’
Xu Runtian has long been involved in agricultural technology extension in Sichuan. He believes that unlike the sandy loam of the plains, the hilly regions of Sichuan consist mostly of clay, which has smaller pores and is harder to level. Previously, through years of meticulous care by farmers, these fields had developed a staggered yet level surface. Given the vast scale of high-standard fields, it is unrealistic to expect an excavator operator to create such a plane based merely on ‘feeling’.
In Village A, where pear trees are grown, over 30 mu of sloping land out of the 1,000 mu total have remained in a state where water cannot drain. Zhang Xiaoqin, who works in the pear orchard, said that the water is even deeper in summer. The owner dug more ditches, and workers tried various drainage methods, but the pear trees in this small area drowned regardless, and machinery could not enter. Before the modifications, this area had actually been the place where the village’s rice grew best.
Visiting multiple villages in Sichuan, Xu Runtian discovered that under the current system of merging small plots into large ones, anyone wishing to farm must re-dig drainage ditches after the high-standard modifications, otherwise the water cannot escape. If these ditches are not dug by the company that took over the land, the burden falls on the village collective or the individual farmers.
Field consolidation is often accompanied by soil modification. According to the *2013 National Overall Plan for High-Standard Farmland Construction*, the rectification of plots must first protect soil fertility: fertile topsoil needs to be stripped and backfilled, and the effective soil layer thickness must reach over 50cm, with a tillage layer thickness of over 20cm. ‘Effective soil layer thickness’ has always been a basic evaluation metric for the acceptance of high-standard fields. In reality, however, it is very difficult to meet this standard.
Several village secretaries and large-scale growers in Zhijin County, Guizhou, told Foodthink that during the high-standard modifications, excavators flipped the fertile soil down and brought the subsoil to the surface. The 3,000 jin of organic matter required per mu by regulation vanished without a trace. ‘They destroyed the only bit of good soil the people had. Rice can’t grow, maize can’t grow. All that’s left is for the land to go waste and grow weeds,’ one village secretary said bitterly. They feel that while the original intent of the policy was good, it was distorted during execution.
II. When an engineering mindset clashes with agriculture: more tech, or more corruption?
In Meishan, two pumping stations were built in Zhao Lishun’s village last spring. Yet, he has never seen water flow from them. During severe spring droughts, villagers still have to pump water from the river themselves; one electric pump even burnt out.
In mid-June 2024, a severe drought hit Henan. Media visits to ten random villages in Xiayi County revealed that boreholes in high-standard farmland were generally dry. Some lacked electricity, while others had poorly buried pipes. Desperate for water, farmers were forced to dismantle the smart irrigation equipment on the boreholes to pump water using traditional methods; some even used electric trikes to charge the boreholes, managing to irrigate only four mu in two days. After more than ten days of drought, it finally took a heavy rain to break the crisis.
A kiwi orchard owner in Shaanxi also had drip irrigation installed as part of the high-standard upgrade. This was the third time the orchard’s channel irrigation had been modified, following the Water Bureau’s “water-saving irrigation project” and the Development and Reform Commission’s “eco-park project”. “We joke that you should install it quickly so the peasants can tear it down immediately, and you can take the money,” he told Foodthink. The key to drip irrigation is pressurising and filtering the water source, but the contractor merely laid pipes from the channel to draw water, “like trying to inflate a tyre without a compressor.” These theoretical pipe systems ultimately became scrap.
One goal of high-standard farmland upgrades is to guarantee harvests regardless of drought or flood, but in reality, shoddy workmanship may leave farmers more vulnerable to meteorological disasters.
In recent years, frequent reports of corner-cutting and land left fallow and overgrown in high-standard farmland projects, along with the examples mentioned above, point to a likely cause: the inherent space for corruption in top-down, multi-layered subcontracting project systems.
According to investigation data from relevant departments disclosed by the *CPPCC Newspaper*, the average construction cost per mu for high-standard farmland nationwide was 3,046 yuan in 2020, rising to over 5,000 yuan in some hilly and mountainous areas. In the memories of Xu Runtian and the former secretary of Village A, the funding for high-standard upgrades revealed by town leaders was even higher.
In Binhai County, Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, the construction of 115,000 mu of high-standard farmland in 2022 involved a total investment of 349 million yuan. The following year, CCTV’s “3.15 Gala” reported that the concrete pipes used for water diversion and irrigation in local high-standard farmland generally suffered from exposed reinforcement and damage, failing to meet national standards. The reason was that contractors, to save money, chose low-cost, poor-quality non-standard pipes, purchasing only a few sections of national-standard pipes for the supervisors to inspect.
In early 2024, reporters from *Yicai* found that reports from at least 12 provinces highlighted irregularities in high-standard farmland construction. These included planning farmland within forest or grassland areas, setting tender conditions to restrict potential bidders, failing to conduct hydrological surveys before drilling agricultural wells, falsifying work to defraud public funds, and leaving land idle and fallow.
These construction issues act like a game of pass-the-parcel, eventually becoming a dilemma for grassroots governance. In Village A, the retired secretary said it took several years before the high-standard farmland construction was signed off for acceptance. “We tried to handle the handover, but couldn’t complete it. The contractor hadn’t received all their money, and people throughout the village were complaining about ‘unfinished projects’—this wasn’t right, that wasn’t right—and the government didn’t seem to want to take it over.” Later, the contractor returned to the village to carry out patchwork repairs.
According to research by scholars including Guo Xiaoming, there is a general disconnect between the entities responsible for construction, use, and maintenance of high-standard farmland across the country. Once the constructors leave, the responsibility for maintenance is often “stranded” with the village committee.
According to this research, once high-standard farmland is completed, it is typically accepted by the county-level agricultural and rural department. Assets such as farmland roads and water conservancy facilities must be handed over to the township government and then transferred to the village collective based on the actual construction. The study also cites data from a State Council audit report: In 2023, across 46 counties and townships in 16 provinces, 2,761 agricultural infrastructure projects—into which 6.929 billion yuan had been invested—lay idle due to a lack of supporting facilities and a tendency to prioritise construction over maintenance.
An insider from the land administration system in a central province also told Foodthink that payments for many high-standard projects in the province are still outstanding, and many officials and contractors involved in the projects have been taken away for investigation by relevant authorities.
Chen Jingjing, a researcher on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, believes that after observing the operational mechanisms of high-standard farmland in multiple locations, the standards, procedures, and supervision are merely performative—everyone is “acting” to meet a set of “correct” and “modern” requirements. During their visits, Foodthink found that at the grassroots level, whether it be village secretaries, brigade leaders, or ordinary villagers, no one has a way to correct this engineered “performance”.
III. Is scale the key to improving agricultural efficiency?
Yet, large-scale operation does not necessarily translate into improved overall agricultural benefits.
Among the many villages surveyed by Foodthink, Village B was the only one that continued to farm and manage its land through a village collective economic entity after the high-standard upgrade. The village possesses significant land—over 5,000 mu—with six or seven hundred labourers remaining, and the village secretary has served for 12 years. Having run the collective economy for four years, the secretary provided a detailed breakdown of the planting accounts since the upgrade.
At the end of 2021, the village reported 800 mu of farmland for high-standard renovation, planting two seasons of grain crops per year. “The plots were made larger, and we thought mechanised planting would save money and labour, and make it easier to find workers,” the secretary explained.
However, once the land was no longer “contracted to individual households”, labour inputs decreased, but the burden on the grower’s field management skills increased. In 2021, because the 550 mu of collectively managed soybeans were too vast to supervise properly, the first crop was ravaged by pests, and nothing was harvested.
Furthermore, as mentioned previously, the use of excavators stripped away the fertile topsoil. Consequently, the 350 mu of rice resulted in a total loss, with yields of only about 200 jin per mu. Under the same drought conditions, where the topsoil had not been destroyed by the upgrade and management was more attentive, villagers farming their own plots achieved yields of 800 jin per mu.
Complex agricultural production tests both management and experience. In fact, in the four years prior to 2021, Village B had also brought in outside entrepreneurs to lease the land for lotus ponds. But after three or four years, the profits no longer justified the land rent of 600 yuan per mu, and the entrepreneurs “vanished.”
From 2023, the village collective adjusted its management model—returning field management to production cooperatives. The cooperative head organises management in exchange for a management fee of 30 yuan per mu and a percentage of the yield. That autumn, rice yields reached 800–900 jin per mu.
While the scale of planting has increased annually, the secretary admitted that even in the best season, planting a thousand mu can earn, at most, over 300,000 yuan. It is easy to see that for an outsider arriving in the countryside with millions in capital looking for opportunities, the return on investment in agricultural logic is vastly inferior to that of the industrial or service sectors.
Notably, Village B also applied for large-scale planting subsidies for nearly two thousand mu—200 yuan per mu for rice, 350 yuan for corn-soybean intercropping, and 200–300 yuan per mu for wheat. These subsidies account for half of the profits from grain planting.
“I just like earning government subsidies,” the village secretary revealed, with a telling smile.
IV. Who eventually picks up the pieces: the bosses, the villagers, or someone else?
More than one villager noted that towards the end of the year, the owners of the fruit tree companies would often end up “bickering”, and shareholders sometimes even had to pay out of pocket to cover employee wages. It is hard to say whether any money is actually being made.
When no suitable boss is willing to take over the lease, the leading companies must continue to pay the land transfer fees to the villagers.
According to Xu Runtian in Village C, the land was returned to the village committee roughly one or two years after the high-standard transformation ended. Today, the leading company is still paying, but the payments have become increasingly erratic. “Now, I don’t even know if we’ll get it,” an elderly man joked. “In the beginning, there were no delays; the money came in that year. The second year, it came in halfway through. Now, it’s simply vanished.”
As for the boss in Meishan who entered the fray only to leave after three days of harvesting, leaving much of the land unplanted, Xu Runtian said he had seen similar cases in other villages where seeds were sown and then abandoned. He believes this often happens because the money earned from selling the rice is not even enough to cover the cost of hiring labour for the harvest.
Alongside the deterioration of these high-standard projects, the capacity for collective governance within the villages has also eroded.
On one hand, the merging of small plots into large fields has erased original boundary lines and land layouts. Some plots have been taken over by roads and water conservancy facilities and are difficult to return to the villagers. Xu Runtian has witnessed this in many places: once the transformed high-standard fields are left unattended, it is difficult for villagers to spontaneously return them to cultivation without a capable local leader to organise and coordinate.
In neighbouring Village D, because it is close to the city’s built-up area, residents were notified during the year of the transformation that the land might be requisitioned. Consequently, no company dared to lease the land. The villagers never received transfer fees, and the land was left fallow for over three years.
A villager who later joined the Village D committee recalled that before cultivation resumed, the land was overgrown with weeds as tall as a person. Under policy mandates against land abandonment, the village committee led the community in weeding, used excavators to dig new water channels in the middle of the large fields, and laid new drainage pipes in 2024. The re-transformation cost over 100,000 yuan.
In Village A, the lease for the pear orchard owner expires in three years. Will the boss leave, and how will the land be re-allocated? “They (the leading companies) will definitely have to find a way to give us an answer,” said Zhang Xiaoqin.
On the other hand, as some villagers have grown accustomed to earning a wage while “passively collecting” land transfer fees, rifts and divisions have emerged between different generations and interest groups within the village.
Villages A, C, and D, visited around Chengdu, issued tender documents as early as 2017 and 2018, making them some of the first areas in Sichuan to undergo high-standard transformation. In Village A, when the newly built field ridges cracked, the villagers no longer took the initiative to repair them. “We aren’t farming anyway.” In Village C, after the leading company “gave up”, the village committee lacked the capacity to organise large-scale production, and some dilapidated water facilities were simply forgotten.
The First and Second Squads of Village A once refused to participate in the high-standard transformation; a few elderly residents leased the land and insisted on farming it themselves. But now, they have grown too old to work the land. Everyone has realised that the policy dividends have run dry, and no more bosses will come. “The young people blame them, asking why they didn’t lease the land or join the project back then,” the old secretary said with a wry smile.
The villagers have seen it all: the rural labour force is dwindling, and transformation and land transfer are irreversible trends. However, once the operation of “large field” engineering fails, the cost of readjustment is far higher. Meanwhile, the owners of the “small plots” have gradually lost their indigenous farming experience and identity. Faced with poor soil and water transformation, low grain returns, and mismanagement, both bosses and farmers find it easy to simply “abandon the farm”.
When high-standard farmland—which should bear the heavy responsibility of food security—encounters the complex realities of agriculture, to what extent is it suited to engineering-led management? How can corruption be eliminated across the long chain of operation, management, and maintenance to ensure production efficiency and adapt to complex terrains such as mountains and hills? Has high-standard farmland truly become a guarantee for food security, or merely a cash cow for agricultural subsidies? With the transformation process two-thirds complete, these questions require more adequate answers.
Editors: Ling Yu, Tian Le