Straw Burning Ban Eased, but Hebei Still Enforces a Blanket Ban – What Do Smallholders Think?

This May I went back to my hometown in southern Hebei and, while I was there, to find out how straw incorporation is going in practice. When the folks from back home heard what I was after, they would pause for a beat first, wearing a look that said, “What’s there even to talk about?” Whether you call it bewilderment or resignation, their reaction carried a blend of emotions –

We’ve been doing straw incorporation for over a decade now. Even if you don’t want to, you get used to it;

Of course we’d rather burn the straw, but that’ll get you detained;

Straw incorporation does have a lot of problems, and it might even cut your grain yield – but what of that? Grain prices are so low that losing a hundred or two hundred jin of harvest doesn’t matter. It’s like skipping one steamed bun; you won’t starve.

Before heading back, I witnessed several instances of straw burning in Heilongjiang. After a decade of forced straw incorporation, Heilongjiang province effectively lifted its straw burning ban last year amid strong farmer opposition, allowing farmers to burn in an orderly manner once they received instructions from higher authorities. A few other provinces are going through similar shifts. The Ecological Environment Code, which came into force this August, also requires that “people’s governments at all local levels shall scientifically and precisely strengthen the organisation, guidance, and management of burning straw, fallen leaves, and similar materials,” marking a new phase in which straw management moves from a blanket burning ban to “scientific and precise burning.”

◉ Vast stretches of farmland that had just been burned in Heilongjiang, as seen by Foodthink at the end of April this year.

However, compared with the north-east, the experience for Hebei farmers is entirely different. Every farmer I spoke with was unaware that other provinces are conditionally allowing burning.

“You light a fire around here and they’ll pick you up.” More than one person put it that way.

In other provinces, farmers often get heated when the straw burning ban comes up. But the folks from Hebei wear a look of calm indifference, say little, and carry an air of resigned helplessness.

The North China Plain where I’m from is a major grain-producing region, typically growing two crops a year: winter wheat and summer maize. Compared with the many problems I saw straw incorporation cause in other provinces, the process in Hebei has gone relatively smoothly, and the tensions are not as pronounced. So what is the reason? Is it that straw incorporation better suits the climate, crop types, and tillage systems here? Or is it that the burning ban is enforced most strictly, so that over more than a decade farmers have already worked out effective ways of coping?

Sowing

Farmers’ main grievances with straw incorporation right now come down to two things: it affects sowing, and it brings on pests and diseases.

Wheat straw is the easy one. Everyone I’ve spoken with says the same: wheat straw is fine, soft, and short. The harvester chops it up and spreads it straight across the surface, and that’s that – what they call surface mulching. When it’s time for maize, a four-legged no-till planter drives through, tilling and sowing each maize row in a single pass. So the spaces between the maize rows stay covered in wheat straw, and even the stubble – up to 20 centimetres tall – is still rooted in the ground. “We leave it all in; it holds the moisture,” the farmers say.

◉ A farmer in Xingtai city, Hebei, no-till drilling maize in a freshly harvested wheat field. Photo: Xinhua

It’s the maize straw that’s the headache. There’s just too much of it. A farmer in Quzhou said: “Maize is planted thick these days, the straw is tall, and putting it all back into the field – there’s no way to deal with it.” So some farmers haul some of the straw off the field themselves – “otherwise the ground is nothing but straw, there’s no soil left.”

He described how, when you irrigate, the water hits and a whole layer of straw just floats on top.

As for how maize straw in the soil affects emergence, farmers have different theories. Some say the straw makes the soil spongy – after sowing, the moment you water it, the seeds sink deep with the soil, and the crops come up late.

Others say: the wheat seeds get caught on straw instead of in soil, and the winter frost kills them. You can see the wheat dying off in whole patches.

In response, one strategy farmers adopt is to sow more seed, which naturally means more spending. Researcher Zhao Qinxu has been working in Hebei villages for years, tackling high-yield grain techniques. He cautions that whether straw incorporation is done properly directly determines the quality of sowing. From his experience, when incorporating maize straw, rotary tillage at a depth of 30 centimetres or more ensures the straw is worked into the top 20-centimetre soil layer. Once the straw and soil are thoroughly mixed, they won’t get in the way of subsequent sowing.

But the farmers I visited generally say the machine operator will rotary-till at most 20 centimetres deep. Everyone knows deeper is better, but the deeper you go, the more fuel it burns – so how is the operator supposed to make any money?

When I asked them why they don’t pay extra to have the operator till to 30 centimetres, the farmers replied: how do you know he’ll actually do what you ask? One said, “Operators range from good to sloppy – some just fob you off. They’ll till deep at the field edge, but go shallow in the middle.”

The end result is that everyone, unspokenly, goes with the minimum – just rotary-tilling the straw enough to get the seed in the ground.

This is also because the profit from growing grain is so slim that, in the farmers’ view, “spending less” matters more than “growing more grain.” Even if a mu loses 100 jin of yield because of this, it’s only a hundred or so yuan. Zhao Qinxu says that from what he has seen on the ground, straw incorporation’s impact on grain yield is essentially negligible – although a very small number of farmers, due to poor incorporation, have lost 60 to 70 per cent of their yield. On the other hand, where incorporation is done well, yields can actually go up by 10 to 15 per cent.

Some do care about the quality of incorporation and will bring in a straw shredder to give the maize straw a second shredding before rotary-tilling it into the field. A farmer in Fengfeng Mining District said shredding a mu of maize straw costs 30 yuan. Some even find that one pass of rotary tillage doesn’t break it up enough, so they have to go over it again. Of course, that naturally means higher costs.

◉ A maize straw shredder in the North China region. Photo: Xianzi

Another strategy is passive resistance. In Quzhou, someone mentioned that just to get their cropping done, farmers have no choice but to rake out the excess maize straw and dump it in some deserted spot on the edge of the village.

“The village is nervous too – afraid of fires,” he said. “What can you do? You’re not allowed to burn it, so where do you put it? In the end, you haul it all out to some useless pit outside the village, get an excavator, and bury it.”

I suppose that counts as “incorporation” too.

Pests and Diseases

Wheat straw is easy to deal with – no need to rotary-till it into the soil – but that very reason is also what makes it more prone to harbouring pests. A farmer in Fengfeng Mining District said there are more bugs on wheat than on maize, because after the wheat is harvested, about 20 centimetres of stubble is still standing in the field. “The hollow stems of the wheat straw – that’s where the bugs breed.”

“This year the yù hàn (aphids) have been particularly bad.” He said that, just over ten days before I visited, he had sprayed once. As we were chatting, he was irrigating the wheat and planned to wait a few days after finishing the watering, then spray again. He has noticed that since straw incorporation, the bugs have clearly multiplied. Crouching by the field edge, he gesticulated emphatically, describing how, without spraying, the main stems of the wheat would be densely covered in black yù hàn. To keep the bugs at bay, he said, pesticide use has gone up by at least a third.

A farmer in Quzhou said that before straw incorporation, spraying was minimal; after incorporation, each crop season requires at least two extra sprays. “These past few years, wheat and maize both need several rounds of spraying. You can’t skip it.”

Weeds have increased too. He believes that incorporation chops up weeds along with the straw, scattering seed into the soil where they grow back endlessly. “And there are more varieties of weeds than before. I’m forty or fifty now, and all sorts of weird, unfamiliar weeds have popped up – we don’t even know where they came from. Some flower, some don’t. Before, the field only had those few kinds of weeds.”

More spraying naturally means higher costs. One spray of a mu costs roughly 20 yuan, but the Quzhou farmer thinks the pesticide itself isn’t the expensive part – it’s the labour for spraying. He runs a livestock farm himself and has no time to farm; his parents are nearly 80 and he has stopped them from working the land. So he has to hire someone to do the spraying.

This is why Zhao Qinxu has repeatedly stressed that the depth of straw incorporation must be ensured, because thorough mixing of straw with soil and deep burial helps suppress pathogens, pests, and weed seeds.

Take the two-spotted cutworm, for example. Hebei was the first region in China where the two-spotted cutworm was found damaging summer maize. Since its first discovery in 2005, the pest spread rapidly around 2011 across Hebei and the Huang-Huai-Hai summer maize region, prompting Hebei to take the lead in drafting local control guidelines. Farmers’ Daily interviewed several experts in 2017, who noted that outbreaks of the two-spotted cutworm are not caused by a single factor but are closely linked to newer tillage systems in “wheat–maize” double-cropping areas, such as machine-harvested straw incorporation and no-till drilling.

After surface mulching with wheat straw, a shaded microclimate forms at the base of the maize seedlings. This provides ideal habitat for two-spotted cutworm larvae, which favour cool, damp conditions, and also shields them from pesticide spray – effectively a perfect refuge. On this point, plant protection experts at the Hebei Academy of Agricultural Sciences recommend either baling the wheat straw and removing it from the field, or breaking up this soft, thick layer of straw that feels like a cotton quilt – for instance, shredding the straw more finely so it is less likely to form a continuous cover layer, using a stubble buster to chop the wheat residue and press it to the ground to reduce the space available to larvae, or clearing straw from the sowing rows.

The last point is rather similar to a home-grown tip that Zhao Qinxu has heard from farmers: once the wheat has come up, leave the sowing rows clear for maize and plant the maize in the open rows. This reduces contact between the maize and the wheat stubble, which to some extent can also help reduce pest and disease pressure.

◉ Maize dead-heart seedlings damaged by the two-spotted cutworm. The straw cover provides larvae with a cool, damp refuge. Photo: Lingshou County People’s Government

The Costs

If you do the maths, the additional costs to farmers from straw incorporation are mainly in: pesticide, machinery (straw shredding, rotary tillage, and so on), seed, and labour.

When I was interviewing a large-scale farmer, I asked him to itemise the cost of every stage of farming. An interesting finding is that straw incorporation may place a heavier burden on smallholder farmers.

First, for straw shredding and rotary tillage, whether large or small, everyone needs machinery to get it done. But the price machine operators charge for serving large farms is lower. “They don’t like moving their machines around. One big plot – no need to relocate, so they’re willing to knock a bit off the price.” Smallholder farmers all expressed understanding. For example, the price for rotary-tilling one mu: large farms typically pay 25–30 yuan, while smallholders pay 40 yuan.

Second, large farms use drones to spray pesticide and herbicide, at roughly 4–5 yuan per mu. If straw incorporation leads to more pests and weeds, spraying costs go up accordingly. For large farms, this is manageable. But for smallholder farmers who do the spraying by hand, it’s all an annoying extra chore. Since they generally spray it themselves, they can’t give a precise figure to work out the economic cost – they just grumble, “It’s such a hassle.”

It is precisely these small “hassles” – the ones that can’t be logged in any cost calculation, the ones everyone overlooks – that pile up into a very real squeeze for farmers, keeping the urge to burn always stirring in the back of their minds.

In 2023, Zheng Jiaxin, a sociology doctoral student at Wuhan University, concluded after fieldwork in Anhui that because smallholder farmers face higher machinery costs for straw incorporation, straw incorporation has effectively accelerated smallholders’ exit from the land. As for Hebei, I haven’t actually seen this. Farmers say that although farming isn’t profitable, they’ll keep at it. Especially after the pandemic cut job opportunities, some villagers who had been working in other provinces came back, started farming, and pick up odd jobs nearby in the slack season. All in all, for farmers, the land remains their last refuge.

An old farmer in Daming County learned about “straw incorporation packets” on Kuaishou and went to an agricultural supplies shop to buy some and give them a try. He spent just over 90 yuan on three packets, scattered them over five or six mu, hoping to help the maize straw decompose a bit faster. As for the results? “I feel like it breaks down a bit quicker,” he said. But when I pressed him on whether he intended to keep using them next year, his answer was just as vague: “Let’s talk about it after the New Year.”

Indifferent, doesn’t matter – that’s the general attitude I sensed among Hebei farmers towards straw incorporation during my fieldwork. They will complain about poor emergence and more pests caused by straw incorporation, but when it comes to yield, they say, “It doesn’t make much difference.”

Sometimes they themselves find this conclusion a little odd. Then they reason that there are many factors affecting yield – maybe the irrigation works the government has built recently have secured the water supply? Or perhaps the quality of chemical fertiliser and seed has improved? But either way, as long as the yield drop isn’t significant, they can accept it. “As long as you can pocket some cash, that’s good enough.” After all, you can’t count on farming to make a living.

◉ If maize straw is not shredded sufficiently and is not thoroughly mixed with the soil, it can cause wheat seed to root shallowly and emerge poorly. Photo: Bilibili creator “Hui Cun Xie Xie”

Baling

They have grown used to straw incorporation, and the impact on yield is not great. Yet the interviewed farmers’ final conclusion is remarkably consistent: they still want to burn it. After burning, the field is clean, easier to work, and there are fewer pests.

One smallholder has 12 mu of land. Right beside his plot, a large-scale farmer from the neighbouring city has leased 800 mu. One year he watched the big farmer send in heavy machinery to bale up and cart away all the straw. He was quite envious and has long hoped someone would come and collect his straw, too. “I asked them to come bale it up, but they said the plot was too small and refused.”

But farmers who have had their straw baled tend to do more complaining. For instance, a farmer in Feixiang said that more than a decade ago, just as the burning ban had first taken effect, someone came to bale the wheat straw. “The baling machine rolls over the ground once on the way in, and once again when it picks up the bales.” He said, “Normally with maize you can just plant straight in. But all that going back and forth compacts the soil solid.”

He does not know whether the machine operators doing the baling receive any government subsidy. Either way, “If the subsidy does not go to the farmers, who is going to pay someone to just churn up the ground for no reason?”

Choosing the lesser of two evils, he ultimately decided to work the straw back into the soil.

Two years ago, something else happened that made him more suspicious of machine operators working in his fields. A few years back, the government promoted deep loosening, subsidising machine operators to work farmers’ land. “They just come free of charge and score a few furrows in the field – it is not a full turning over – leaving it all in ridges and furrows, and then when you are ploughing it is harder to get the job done.” He said that after machine operators mucked around like that, farmers no longer want anyone coming to do deep loosening.

◉ To improve the quality of arable land, the central government has allocated funding for several consecutive years to support mechanised deep loosening and land preparation. But as with straw incorporation, once implementation is compromised in the field, it ends up hindering farmers’ work. Source: Handan New Three Rurals

Decades of using chemical fertiliser and pesticide alongside intensive cultivation have already overdrawn the land’s nutrient reserves. This is precisely what straw incorporation aims to address – replenishing organic matter, improving soil structure, and sustaining long-term soil fertility. But have farmers actually felt the benefit? Every farmer I met agreed: the soil has indeed become looser, no longer hard-crusted. Zhao Qinxu also said that returning maize straw to the field does increase soil organic matter, and you can tell just by looking at the colour. “Go to a farmer’s field and you can see the topsoil is a darker shade. Run a test on the soil organic matter content and you can measure it too.”

But farmers have not reduced their chemical fertiliser use. There are two main reasons: first, straw increases soil organic matter, while the readily available nutrients that crops need to absorb still come mainly from chemical fertiliser; second, over-fertilisation is actually a problem in many parts of China, because farmers do not know the composition of their own soil and can only rely on experience – and a fear of yield loss – to continue (or even increase) their previous chemical fertiliser use.

Farmers’ mindset still holds that “the more chemical fertiliser, the better.” This also hinders their understanding of the relationship between straw incorporation and soil health. Only when straw incorporation is combined with measures such as soil-test-guided formulated fertilisation and nutrient balance management is the improvement in soil fertility more likely to gradually translate into reduced chemical fertiliser use. But how do you truly get to know your soil? This is both a knowledge blind spot for farmers and a gap in grassroots agricultural extension services.

Even as straw incorporation has become a widely accepted farming practice across the North China Plain, farmers have not truly embraced it.

– This is Foodthink’s 834th original article –