What Extra Does Straw Incorporation Cost Farmers?

To Farm, First Shred the Straw

“The village said they simply couldn’t cope! Just plough it into the field!”

Zhao Hai recalled that after the autumn harvest last year, he had asked village officials to arrange straw removal from the fields — in other words, to have machinery operators bale the rice straw up and haul it away. He helped manage several hundred mu of rice paddies and felt this was the easiest way to get rid of the straw. But his plea went unheeded — the village committee failed to find a buyer for the straw, and most of it had to be incorporated back into the fields by default.

In June this year, Foodthink visited three counties in Hunan to find out how straw incorporation affects farmers’ livelihoods. Village A, where we went, had just experienced the strictest straw burning season in history the previous year. The authorities demanded that no fires be lit anywhere at all. Abruptly forced to return the straw to the soil, Zhao Hai endured a turbulent six months or more, witnessing bizarre scenes he had never seen in all his years of farming, and racking up a great deal of extra expense.

Village A lies deep within the Dongting Lake area of Hunan. Its farmland was historically formed by deposits of lake silt, and the terrain is remarkably flat, making it a major production zone for rice and oilseed rape. Embankments separate the village’s drainage ditches from the waterways outside, and irrigation is carried out by pumping water in via electric drainage pumps. In recent years the village has taken up crayfish farming: channels snake through the paddies, shallow water mirrors the sky, and egrets can often be seen foraging along the field ridges.

In previous years, after the autumn rice harvest, farmers would follow instructions from above and burn the straw in an orderly fashion, then sow oilseed rape seed directly into the fields. Some would flood the paddies instead to raise crayfish. Faced with the sudden straw burning ban, the first thing farmers had to confront was a thick, tangled layer of rice straw covering their fields.

Crouching down for a closer look, this layer of “grass” contained both shredded rice stems and leaves and rice stubble still rooted in the soil — the root systems and short stems protruding above the surface. Experts vividly called it a “sponge layer”. If it could not be thoroughly turned into the soil and left to decompose in time, it would prevent the tiny oilseed rape seeds from taking root and the seedlings from growing, resulting in reduced yields.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs’ Guidance on the Scientific Incorporation of Crop Straw into Fields for Autumn 2022 Harvest, the recommended practice for the rice–oilseed rape rotation zone in northern Hunan is to use a combine harvester fitted with a straw chopping and spreading device. At harvest, the straw should be chopped simultaneously and spread evenly, with an average stubble height of less than 15 centimetres.

In practice, though, machinery operators routinely left stubble heights far above 15 centimetres to save fuel and speed up the job. The second round of routine inspections by the Hunan Provincial Ecological Environment Protection Supervision Group in 2023 showed that, across 80 rice-growing fields, stubble heights ranged from 40 to 60 centimetres.

Moreover, among the combine harvesters checked at random in the fields, more than half had no straw chopping and spreading device installed. This was because fitting a set of shredding blades meant a heavier load on the machine, greater fuel consumption, and at least ten yuan extra in costs per mu, while working time also increased. So operators would often quietly leave the blades idle or remove some of them, achieving only partial shredding.

A local agricultural official also admitted reluctantly: machinery operators from other areas work on a mobile basis, margins are already thin, and they cannot earn the local straw incorporation subsidies — naturally, they are unwilling to increase the machine’s load or spend more on fuel. The local government, too, has very little leverage over them.

As a result, two mindsets emerged among farmers: large-scale growers who owned their own machinery were willing to cut low — shorter rice stubble made subsequent field operations easier, so they spared no expense in fuel or time to prepare the land; but for smallholders, the wool always comes off the sheep, so they were unwilling to pay machinery operators extra just for a thorough shredd and preferred to take their chances and burn the straw in secret.

The village secretary of Village A also acknowledged that most villagers’ straw had not even been shredded — long stalks were still left standing. If the village did not arrange for it to be baled and carted away, they would look for an opportunity to set fire to it.

As mentioned earlier, Village A had failed to find a buyer for the straw and had no choice but to find a way to deal with the long stalks. They coordinated with the town, which dispatched its own machinery to shred the straw a second time. According to locals, the subsidy or labour fee paid to machinery operators was 30–35 yuan per mu.

Straw shredding means running the rice straw through a shredder once more. Locals attach a shredding head to the back of their tractor. For rotary tillage, the corresponding blades are swapped in.

The straw was simply too thick. Even when the town government footed the bill and dispatched straw-shredding machinery, the results were far from satisfactory.

Moreover, because this machinery was dispatched by the town, it did not necessarily take orders from the farmers. Zhao Hai’s impression was that only the core area was shredded properly and thoroughly; on the remaining plots, the operators simply ran through a quick pass and called it a day.

With that, the first step of straw incorporation — shredding — was complete. Next, if farmers in Village A wanted to plant oilseed rape for the following crop, they had to rotary-till the shredded straw into the soil. The blades of a rotary tiller dig more than 10 centimetres deep and burn more fuel, but there was no longer any subsidy for this stage. Hiring a machinery operator cost 80 yuan per mu. Before the burning ban, rotary tillage was only used before planting rice; for oilseed rape, all that was needed was digging channels (30 yuan per mu). The extra 50 yuan had to come out of the farmers’ own pockets.

Compounded by heavy rainfall, the result was a severe drop in yields. Farmers in Village A reported that the oilseed rape failed to take root, seedlings struggled to emerge, and plants were prone to lodging. Many harvested only 100–200 jin per mu, whereas normal yields were 300–400 jin.

80 Yuan Extra

To maintain yields, Village A’s solution was simply to sow more. Two bags of seed per mu had been the norm, but on some plots the amount rose to three or even four. Although, as an oilseed crop, the planting seed for oilseed rape is funded by the state, the village secretary reckoned it was still taxpayers’ money. Besides, the seed provided by the government isn’t always sufficient — Zhao Hai, for instance, always has to buy a little extra on top.

They also considered adopting the no-till straw mulching method outlined in the aforementioned Straw Incorporation Guidance, which would spare them the expense of rotary tillage. But the rice stubble spread across the soil surface was uneven in thickness, and this would still affect rooting and germination; many farmers were not optimistic about this method.

Meanwhile, Village B near Changsha had been incorporating straw into fields since 2021, without using rotary tillage. Their experience was “richer” — or, as the locals put it, they had racked their brains time and again, trying all sorts of ways to deal with the problems that straw incorporation brought.

Before this, they would first plough the field, then form ridges and beds and sow by hand — but oilseed rape still did not take root well.

Now they had pieced together a combination approach: first, cut the rice stubble lower. Then, large-scale growers purchase their own blade units capable of both straw shredding and stubble destruction, mounting them on the front of their tractors — after the subsidy, one unit costs around 5,000 yuan. These blades do more than shred straw; they also destroy stubble — that is, they dig out and chop up the rice root systems buried beneath the soil.

Finally, to help the oilseed rape take root more effectively, they sow with a seed drill. After straw shredding and stubble destruction, this machine can fertilise, sow, rotary-till and dig channels all in one pass — the agricultural department had specifically promoted it, and after subsidy, a unit costs roughly 20,000 yuan.

However, compared to Village A, no one in Village B pays for straw shredding any more — the straw incorporation subsidy is less than 10 yuan per mu. After large-scale growers finish shredding, they apply to the authorities for the subsidy, which can cover just under half of the cost of that one operation, but the disbursement still has not been approved.

According to estimates from several farmers across both villages, after straw incorporation, the extra costs of straw shredding, rotary tillage, and pesticide spraying for one season’s oilseed rape work out at roughly 60–80 yuan. The per-mu profit for oilseed rape, though, is generally just over 200 yuan.

Someone simply abandoned cultivation. A large-scale grower in Village A had 200 mu of land; after secretly burning just over ten mu, he decided to give up — his plots were scattered, and it made no economic sense for a rotary tiller to travel 20 kilometres back and forth to grow a little oilseed rape. On top of that, because the land had only recently been upgraded to high-standard farmland and the soil surface was still uneven, his rotary tillage costs ran higher than those of his neighbours, at 120 yuan per mu. In the end, he left all 200-plus mu of land to the village collective to grow green manure.

Pest Damage and Soy Sauce Water

During the visit to Village B, the aforementioned agricultural official kept stressing that straw incorporation returns fertility to the soil. “Without incorporation, even applying the same fertiliser, yields will certainly be lower.”

But in the interviews, no farmer had actually cut back on chemical fertiliser use. In front of the official, a Village B large-scale grower who had been incorporating straw for five years could only say, diplomatically: “Is it possible that the potency of chemical fertiliser isn’t as good as it used to be?”

Perhaps they are so worried about yields falling that they dare not reduce their fertiliser use at all. But a crayfish farmer in Village A had seen with his own eyes how the straw had “enriched” the water — the amount of feed the crayfish consumed had dropped noticeably. He uses a compound microbial product based mainly on Lactobacillus plantarum to amend the pond bottom, combined with brown sugar and rapeseed meal, to encourage the growth of microbes and plankton in the pond and to indirectly promote the decomposition of organic matter on the bottom (such as leftover feed and waste).

In such conditions, the feed he had stocked up on the basis of previous years’ usage was nowhere near exhausted. Crayfish do not actually eat straw, but the microbial agent may promote the proliferation of microbes on the straw’s surface and the breakdown of organic matter, allowing a biofilm and organic detritus to form on the straw that the crayfish can feed on.

But there are drawbacks too. Once the straw begins to rot, the paddy quickly turns into a murky, dark “soy sauce water” — foul-smelling and filthy. Just give it a slight stir and — “Good heavens, all the stench comes pouring out!” Zhao Hai said.

The aforementioned farmer may have saved on feed, but he also acknowledged that he had to change the water every three days. In Village A, a flatland water-town where every household relies on electric drainage pumps to draw water into the ditches, his fields sit right alongside the ditch — conveniently perched by the water, as the old saying goes — “The moment the colour changes, I swap it out.” He changed the water at least a dozen times in one season.

But not all farmers have that luxury. In recent years, the village has faced situations where the external river had no stored water and there was simply none to swap in. Crayfish fall ill and die; sometimes, before the farmer even realises the water needs changing, the juvenile crayfish have already perished. And adding more pumps and pumping infrastructure costs money too. In fact, farmers are entitled to a 10-yuan-per-mu “straw-via-livestock return” subsidy, but nearly a year on, it has still not materialised.

Setting aside what was gained and what was lost, one thing was plain for everyone to see: the explosion of pest damage on farmland.

The Village A secretary recalled that during the autumn harvest, he would drive out to the fields at night, and the moment he switched on his torch, the ground would be crawling with insects.

One grower in Village A said that half of the extra 80 yuan he spent on inputs went on pest control. The drone service charges 20 yuan per mu, and it made two flights. In previous years, his oilseed rape had never needed a single pesticide spray.

The pests do not only affect the winter oilseed rape — they take a greater toll on the rice from spring through summer. Two large-scale growers in Village B recalled that seven or eight years ago, the rice stem borer (colloquially known as the “heart-boring worm”) was not so severe; without any spraying, the larvae would at most damage a handful of plants. Yet within a few years, they could wipe out an entire rice crop. Rice thrips have also become ever more numerous: once confined to the seedling nurseries, they are now found wherever there is straw.

The spraying frequency and intensity are both increasing. Previously, pesticide was only needed once the rice entered the grain-filling stage; by the time the ears were “nodding”, the borers had stopped tunnelling into the stems. Now, just half a month after transplanting, high-quality imported pesticides must be applied, and spraying continues right up to harvest — three to four passes per rice season. Some smallholders have sprayed eight times in a single season and still failed to control the pests. “What does that mean? Spraying every twenty-odd days — steeped in pesticide!” the large-scale grower who helped with the harvest remarked with a sigh.

Farmers and agricultural technicians have also noticed that some insects seem to have developed pesticide resistance, as though they had “mutated” or “levelled up”.

Farmers have their own analysis: with the straw no longer being burned, insects can shelter in the rice stubble through winter, making eradication impossible. Moreover, the local plots are fragmented, with single-season, early-season, and late-season rice intermixed in what they call “patchwork plots” — once you spray on one side, the pests fly over from the neighbouring field, causing damage in turn and making coordinated prevention and control nearly impossible.

They all remember when an official from Changsha, Hunan Province, personally went out to the countryside and split open a piece of “hetou zi” (the local word for rice stubble) — inside a single stub, he counted over a dozen worms.

The aforementioned agricultural official confirmed that rice stem borer damage had “caused incidents” in Hunan, with some areas suffering total crop failure. Since 2024, the Hunan Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has repeatedly used language such as “tough battle”, “severe resurgence”, and “widespread outbreak” to describe the stem borer situation in rice paddies. In April 2025, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs made a special trip to Hunan to investigate stem borer prevention and control.

That same year, the Pest and Disease Bulletin of the Hunan Plant Protection and Quarantine Station forecast that rice pests and diseases would occur at moderately severe levels overall, with a combined affected area of 310 million mu-times across multiple pests and diseases, of which the rice stem borer would account for 62 million mu-times. In addition, the province-wide weighted average pest density for the stem borer was 9,773 per mu, up 67.6% from the ten-year average and 20.9% above 2024 levels.

The interviewees worried that as straw incorporation continues, pest damage will only grow worse.

Ecological Rice Growers’ Solution

Is straw burning an inevitable by-product of high-intensity, intensive agriculture?

First, continuous cropping or tightly packed planting cycles leave no room for crop rotation or fallow periods, turning the soil into a permanent breeding ground for pests. Several Hunan villagers we interviewed recalled that, as children, the land lay unplanted through winter, and the commune would organise soil sun-drying: the subsoil was turned up to the surface, and the winter frost invariably killed off a good number of insects.

Nowadays, only tobacco land still gets this kind of soil sun-drying treatment, because tobacco seedlings are not transplanted until March or April, leaving the land free to lie fallow over winter after the autumn harvest.

On top of that, when rice is cut by hand rather than harvested by machine, farmers can slice the stubble far lower — down to a single inch — “like shaving a head”, leaving insect eggs nowhere to hide. The Pest and Disease Bulletin cited earlier also noted that over 90% of the province’s rice is now harvested by machine, and that stubble stumps in mechanically harvested fields tend to be much taller.

Most importantly, as gas and electricity reached rural areas and livestock farms scaled up, the low-heat-value straw became useless. Once upon a time, it was stacked neatly on the attic shelf above the pigsty — used to fuel the kitchen fire, to feed pigs and cattle, to line the roof and the beds; even the rice grains picked out of early-season stubble could be fashioned into little straw men…

In Village C, in another town within the same Dongting Lake area, Ding Yong has been practising ecological methods on his ten-plus mu of rice paddy for years, mulching with straw. He said the last year’s concentrated outbreak of rice planthoppers did not hit him all that hard: the rest of the village could no longer keep them at bay, but his yields stayed within the usual range of fluctuation. He credited the biodiversity his fields had achieved: the rice stem borers come and go year after year, but so do their natural enemies — rove beetles, spiders and the like — keeping borer damage to tolerable levels.

Ding Yong added that he sows Chinese milk vetch as green manure about ten days before cutting the mid-season rice, while the soil is still damp. After harvest, the straw is laid directly on the soil surface, which actually shields the young vetch from the sun and helps with soil moisture conservation — for Hunan’s autumn is anything but cool in late September and early October. The seeds still germinate all the same, and the expense of rotary tillage disappears.

The straw that gives Village A farmers such a headache, Ding Yong wishes he had more of. To mulch the crops in his greenhouse vegetable plot, he cuts his own grass and dries it. Even “revolutionary grass”, one of the most stubborn weeds around, has multiple uses: beyond mulching, it can be fermented into liquid fertiliser. ‘Mulching does so much good — I call it my five-fold insurance: it holds water, holds soil, holds moisture, holds fertility, and suppresses weeds,’ Ding Yong explained in a measured voice. Above all, it returns nutrients to the earth, perfectly in line with his philosophy of “energy cycling”.

To deal with the straw, Ding Yong also bought a shredder head for 4,000 yuan (after subsidy).

When we visited the local straw collection and storage facility, we found unwanted, damp, sprouted — even mouldy — bales dumped outside the warehouse. Ding Yong saw it differently: there was straw and rice husks, the ideal setting for no-till mulch potato growing. ‘This mulch-and-no-till method isn’t fussy about the soil,’ he said.

And other fragments of broken straw mixed with clumps of soil, left over from the baling process — to him, that was all treasure simply misplaced. He could haul it home to enrich his vegetable beds.

For all that Ding Yong treats straw as treasure, he is not the sort of farmer the government subsidises. Priority subsidies go to large-scale operations processing more than ten thousand tonnes of straw a year. Ding Yong understood, too: an operator has to marshal enormous quantities of straw across a whole region, liaise with sellers, chase the subsidy — they have no appetite for, nor the bandwidth to carry out, the meticulous ecological cycling possible on a single small plot.

In the village where Ding Yong farms, we also visited other conventional growers. They, too, had secretly dismantled the shredding unit on their harvesters, or even burned straw — especially during the brief fallow gap between cutting early-season rice and sowing late-season rice. The rough road that Village A and Village B farmers are still treading with straw incorporation, these farmers had already walked: they had once accepted government-distributed free machinery for straw crushing and stubble destruction, only to face yet more pest damage. Now they simply pay out of their own pockets to rotary-till the straw back into the soil.

Within the same village, two farming systems mean two very different ledgers of cost and return. For the large-scale grower, it comes down to counting every penny, managing yields, and investing in machinery, so that at year’s end the grain can be sold, the land rent paid to smallholders, and the fertiliser supplier settled. In that situation, as Zhao Hai put it: whether you burn or not, the pesticide spraying never stops for a single moment; but once you stop burning, field management gets easier — the harrow tines don’t tangle in straw during rotary tillage — all told, it’s simply less hassle.

Yet Ding Yong’s apparent ease of handling comes with its own price tag. As an ecological grower, he has spent years nurturing a local ecosystem, pouring in far more labour to weed, run comparative trials, and brew enzyme compost — his labour costs are considerably higher. And if his tenancy were ever changed, or an extreme weather event struck, that small pocket of biodiversity could vanish overnight.

And so, even though ecological cultivation seems to offer a better path towards a ‘painless’ straw return, we cannot casually declare one approach more viable, or more “eco-friendly”, than the other.

At the end of the day, the straw burning ban is an extraordinarily complex ledger. Farmers’ livelihoods, ecological consequences, administrative costs — these are all critical line items on the balance sheet, yet they are perpetually obscured by the single target of air quality. Only by seeing the real struggle farmers face under the burning ban can we find a genuine way forward for straw.

– This is Foodthink’s 832nd original article –

Zhao Hai is a pseudonym.

All photographs taken by the author unless otherwise stated.

Editor: Ling Yu

Layout: Xiao Shu

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