Don’t Let Crop Straw Be the Last Straw for Village Cadres

The Harshest Straw-Ban Season

Everyone could feel that the straw-ban enforcement had suddenly gone for real.

This is Village A in 2025, situated in the heart of the Dongting Lake region in Hunan Province. The terrain is flat and the area is a major rice-producing zone. The village has several thousand mu of farmland, primarily planted with single-season rice, sown in spring and harvested in autumn. In winter, residents raise crayfish and grow rapeseed. About a third of the fields lie in winter fallow, or a small portion is planted with two-season rice.

“The boss called me: ‘Don’t burn, whatever you do, don’t burn!’” Zhao Hai, who farms several hundred mu for others in Village A, remembers it vividly. Before, he would see people in the fields every year giving publicity and making appeals, but whatever was meant to be burned still got burned.

Old village secretary Sun Weimin also understood that things were different this year. Although the national crop-straw no-burning policy had been in place for over a decade, enforcement in practice varied from place to place—sometimes loose, sometimes tight. Village A had been on the looser side. In the past, the county would issue notices to the village office, and each town would burn in scheduled slots, in orderly sequence. That had been the way of things for all these years, and they had managed to get by.

However, from 2022 to 2024, Hunan Province’s air-quality-related indicators failed to meet assessment requirements for three consecutive years, causing Hunan to see “consecutive ranking drops in the Central Pollution Prevention and Control Campaign Performance Assessment and deductions in the province-wide Comprehensive Performance Assessment for High-Quality Development.” By the end of 2025, Hunan’s number of heavy-pollution days had already exceeded the national assessment threshold, and the “air pollution prevention and control situation was extremely severe.”

In June 2025, Hunan Province issued a plan that, for the first time at the provincial level, designated crop-straw no-burning zones and restricted-burning zones. Changsha, as well as the cities and counties of Yueyang, Yiyang, and Changde in the Dongting Lake region, were all classified as Category I control zones, with the proportion of arable land designated as no-burning set at “no less than 90 per cent in principle.”

Village A happened to fall within a Category I control zone. At the end of August, the county where Village A is located issued a notice ratcheting up the requirements: all arable land in the county was designated a no-burning zone, and burning was prohibited “at any time, under any meteorological conditions and air quality circumstances.” The notice was valid for five years, with joint inspections to be organised and conducted by the office of the county ecological and environmental protection committee.

Pressure cascaded down through every level. The town government also issued a dedicated work plan. The town comprehensive law-enforcement brigade formed a full-time no-burning patrol team, authorised to “immediately stop” any burning and impose “on-the-spot penalties.” Village A compiled a dedicated straw register and formed a patrol team of five or six members, who recorded each household’s planting area and went door to door, household by household, having farmers sign a no-burning pledge.

◉ Map of no-burning and restricted-burning zones for crop straw across Hunan Province’s arable land. As can be seen, the major staple-grain producing areas in the plains are almost entirely within no-burning zones, with no longer any opportunity for scheduled, staggered controlled burning. Source: “Notice on Designating Zones Where Open Burning of Crop Straw Is Prohibited”

Patrolling Into the Night

In September, with the autumn harvest underway, the patrol teams began going into the fields. Zhao Hai still remembers it clearly: the village service team, the town agriculture office, urban management, public security—all of them came. The village was abuzz, and the old secretary’s voice played over and over on the loudspeaker:

“For these past couple of days, patrol teams have been coming. Absolutely do not burn—listen carefully, absolutely do not burn, and you must not burn tonight between eight and nine either!”

Liu Xiao is a member of the village service team and also a village committee cadre. Upon receiving the assignment, he began patrolling outdoors every day; the moment a fire point was spotted, he would rush over to put it out. By the end of a day, his electric scooter’s battery was completely drained.

He would take photos of himself still working outdoors at eight or nine in the evening and post them in the work group chat, complete with timestamp and location. Sometimes the photos showed only the road: it was too dark to make out the fields clearly, but he needed to prove he was still on patrol.

Under policy requirements, two teams operate at the town level: one shift comprises county-level units assigned to support the town government, and the other is the air-quality office’s full-time supervision group. Both go to the village every day to conduct inspections. In addition, municipal- and provincial-level unannounced inspection teams occasionally carry out surprise visits.

At the grassroots level, satellite remote sensing and China Tower video surveillance have long been established technologies for monitoring changes in arable land use, and they happen to be well suited for monitoring crop-straw burning. The former captures photographs as it passes overhead, detecting thermal-imaging anomalies within a radius of about a hundred kilometres; the latter uses 24-hour HD cameras to scan plots within a few kilometres, triggering an alarm when a suspected fire is detected. Together, they have become virtually the most important tool for the town law-enforcement brigade to monitor fires in real time.

A typical real-time monitoring and firefighting sequence goes roughly like this: at around 6 p.m., the town’s on-duty staff member posts a photo in the work group chat, @a village cadre: There is a fire to the northeast of Tower No. X in Village X, please deal with it. The staff member simultaneously posts a photo noting that “the cameras have all been turned away”—presumably so that no fire-point record would remain. Within a mere ten minutes, the two village cadres both replied in unison: Handled.

◉ The “Tower Sky-Eye” monitoring system, developed by China Tower. Source: C114 Communication Network

Once even a single small fire point appears in the village, officials at every level risk disciplinary action. Between 2023 and 2025, feedback from Hunan Province’s ecological and environmental protection inspection revealed that multiple cities and counties had been issued circulars of criticism and summoned for regulatory questioning over inadequate handling of fire points. Near Changsha, it is said that one town had three recorded fire points while another had only two; when the municipal inspection team wanted to make an example, they dismissed an official from the agriculture department. The county where Village A is located has already dismissed two section-level cadres.

But, “You can discipline the town, you can discipline the village, but there is nothing you can do about the ordinary people—there is no real leverage,” Sun Weimin said.

All the pressure ultimately funnels down to the village committee. Sun Weimin sleeps at home clutching his phone, notifications on, and whenever a new message pops up in the group chat, he checks whether the tower in the photo belongs to his village.

◉ A crop-straw no-burning fine warning sign in a city in Hunan. Source: Sanxiang Metropolis Daily

Although the policy explicitly stipulates “a fine of 500 to 2,000 yuan,” Sun Weimin says that in the end each village could only catch one or two people and make a token gesture. There was even a farce in which an 80-year-old was detained but his son was tardy in coming to pick him up. Despite countless efforts—and at one point the village committee was called in too—they still managed to collect no fine at all.

The old secretary’s repeated emphasis on the loudspeaker that “you must not burn between eight and nine either” was naturally for a reason—by that hour, a full day of sunshine had dried the crop straw out and made it soft and flammable, and the patrol teams had gone home for dinner. Sometimes the cameras had already quietly turned their heads away. And so, by eight o’clock, flames were rising in the fields again.

“Can I be honest? In the end, it all got burned.” One villager said. Liu Xiao, who was on patrol duty, also admitted that the few mu of his own family’s land had ultimately been burned too.

But the exhausting and futile patrols lasted a full three months. Hiring someone to patrol the village for a day cost at least 100 yuan. On this, a villager group leader explained that as long as a patrol team was arranged, when government inspectors came knocking, the village could say they had indeed deployed people and done their job properly. “It was them who insisted on burning—I couldn’t stop it.”

Zhao Hai felt further that whether at the village or the town level, sending people down to patrol was all just for show. “If there were no one patrolling at all, then they really would come under fire. They don’t have it easy either—try to understand.”

◉ Left: The broom the village patrol team uses to put out fires. Right: A village committee cadre in charge of finances assisting with firefighting (to protect the interviewee’s privacy, the right-hand image is AI-generated based on a photo provided by the interviewee).

What to Do with the Straw?

Town and village cadres were also racking their brains to find an outlet for the crop straw. In Village A, the biggest job during the 2025 autumn harvest was to liaise with buyers and agricultural machinery operators to get the straw dealt with.

One approach was to bale it up and haul it off; the other was to shred it and either incorporate it into the soil or spread it on the surface. In technical terms, these are called “off-field removal” and “field return,” respectively.

What Village A tried first was baling for off-field removal. In September, a baler was driven into the village, but in the end only two or three hundred mu were baled.

In promotional videos online, a large baling machine rolls in and has the field tidied up in a few passes; some integrated models can even harvest and bale in a single pass. But in Zhao Hai’s view, the machine that came to their village wasn’t “quite that sophisticated”—it would often break down mid-job, and someone had to pull the straw out by hand.

Smallholder households also worked to different rhythms. Although it was all single-season rice—planted in April, harvested in September—some families had already finished harvesting and drying their grain and were waiting to flood the fields for crayfish (about a third of the village’s arable land is used for crayfish farming, the villagers’ most important source of supplemental income), while neighbouring plots may have barely started the harvest. By the time the baler turned up, if it rained again, the straw couldn’t be collected, and the whole trip would have been for nothing.

Besides, although the machine operators who came to bale had a subsidy, they were not responsible for transporting or selling the straw. Large piles of baled crop straw accumulated in front of and behind the houses and along the farm tracks. The village committee reached out to an agricultural company that had built a straw collection and storage centre locally, and the two sides agreed to shred it into feed and sell it to livestock farms.

By this point, the agricultural company told Sun Weimin that the machine had broken down and couldn’t shred, and that a transformer needed to be installed. Once the mechanical problem was sorted, the company said it couldn’t find a buyer. They had no choice but to haul the straw from over a hundred mu to the factory. By then, the factory was already stacked with straw bales of all sizes from several neighbouring villages. As of this summer, that straw still hadn’t sold. Sun Weimin said that straw at several such collection and storage points had similarly failed to find a market.

◉ Inside the agricultural company’s warehouse, the steel roof is gleaming new; large quantities of crop straw are stored on this plot of concrete-hardened ground, reportedly built on land designated as basic farmland.

Agricultural schedules don’t wait. In early October, rapeseed sowing machinery arrived at the field edges. The company helped out again, hauling the remaining straw bales from about 150 mu of field edges onto the village road. During the National Day holiday, the village spent a bit over a thousand yuan hiring tractors to drag the straw to the open space behind the village committee office. The village committee was racing time every day.

The hardships along the way are not easily put into words by those who haven’t been through them. One farmer recalled that the weather was still hot then, and with only three or five mu of his own, it took him three days just to haul the crop straw home by cart.

Alas, the weather didn’t cooperate. Soon it rained for days on end. The straw that hadn’t been baled in time rotted in the fields, the ground turned to sloppy mud in every direction, and no vehicle could get through. Sun Weimin remembered that some crayfish farmers’ straw still hadn’t been hauled out, and they came to the village committee every day to complain. Straw was piled up in front of the committee office, and insects had taken over the offices and store rooms.

◉ Early June 2026. A rotting pile of crop straw at the village entrance; the wild grass has grown taller than a person.

Finally the skies cleared, but worried about missing the next season’s planting window, the villagers couldn’t resist and started burning crop straw again. The village committee hastily drove the straw shredder sent down by the town into the fields and pressed on with land preparation. The villagers complained one after another: the straw was too thick to shred; it was too late—rapeseed sowing was already delayed and the harvest would suffer; the large baler, together with bales weighing over 50 kg each, was too heavy and had already compacted the soil beyond farming…

The pile of crop straw in front of the village committee office had already begun to rot, with wild grass growing through it. One day it suddenly caught fire. A neighbouring town once had a giant straw pile—no one knew whether it was deliberately set alight or an accident—but it burned for a full week.

But this time it only produced black smoke. The straw had been soaked by rain and, being tightly compressed from baling, simply would not catch. There was nothing to do but quickly douse it with water and hire people to rake the pile flat.

“(When) they were at it, I just wanted to laugh, but there was nothing I could do about it,” Zhao Hai remarked.

By this point, of the village’s several thousand mu, only two or three hundred had been baled for off-field removal, and just over a thousand mu had had their straw shredded and incorporated back into the field. Vast amounts of crop straw still lay piled in the fields, yet October was already halfway through. Unable to wait any longer, the villagers started burning again every few days.

The “Window”

A chance suddenly came.

As mentioned earlier, the high-definition cameras on the towers could, on occasion, be turned to look the other way. No explicit rule spelled out when or who operated them, but the villagers all knew that now and then there would be some gaps.

A rumour, supposedly from inside the government system, began to circulate. “We’ve got a few hours today!” The village committee immediately alerted the heads of every villager group, who relayed it to the farmers sitting on straw with nowhere to store it, waiting to sow rapeseed and flood the fields for crayfish: from what hour to what hour the cameras would not be watching—go ahead and burn!

The rain had stopped days ago. The straw that had not been baled had long since dried out, the dry stalks lying neatly stacked in a line. Once someone set fire to one end, the flames could simply sweep the entire stretch.

A village ten kilometres away lit the first fires, Village A followed suit, then another village to the south did the same. “They were all up and burning in one go!” “You could see it from dozens of kilometres out in the county seat. A whole lot of police showed up, but what could they do? The law can’t chase a crowd!” the villagers lamented.

No one knew how much land had been burned in the other villages, but in Village A this time at least over a thousand mu had been set alight, and the burning lasted three to four hours. The villagers described how the sky had burned a deep red.

◉ In a photo from another tower camera, the burn marks are clearly visible. Image source: interviewee

Hearing people say “the common folk are grateful to you,” Sun Weimin felt a bitter pang. He had spent decades on the village committee, lived through the agricultural tax, been through flood relief, was used to spending the whole day in the party branch office, dozing in his chair, perpetually interrupted by villagers who needed him to sort out and mediate all manner of matters. But when it came to the crop-straw burning ban, he had nothing more to say—only a headache.

The higher-ups did send people down, after all. The next evening, the village to the south had been burning for barely two hours before it was shut down. Fortunately, Village A had already finished. It was then they learned the provincial inspection team would arrive in a day.

This time it was not so easy to fool the tower cameras. The provincial verification relied on satellite imagery; the vast stretches of charred black earth would be impossible to conceal under the satellite’s “all-seeing eye.” The higher-level government hurriedly consulted with Village A and overnight marshalled 16 large rotavators to turn the scorched topsoil back into the ground. The night’s work cost 60,000 yuan, reportedly footed by the town government. The matter was finally over.

But Sun Weimin’s work was far from done.

At the end of October, rain fell over the town, and someone in the crop-straw burning ban work group quipped: At last I can get a proper night’s sleep! If there were anyone so industrious (burning in the rain), they would deserve a hearty commendation.

By December, the rapeseed was all sown and the young crayfish were beginning to grow, but the villagers, in their winter fallow, still wanted to burn the grass in the fields and around the houses to cut down on next year’s pests, or to burn some rubbish, dead branches, and fallen leaves, or set off a few firecrackers. All of it was prohibited: in the data criteria used by the towers and the environmental department, any flame counted as a “fire point.”

More messages kept appearing in the group:

“On X December, the province reported X fire points in our city. Today, the Meteorological Bureau has issued a yellow-level haze warning. Heavy haze is forecast within the next 24 hours, and the current situation is extremely serious.”

“The municipal bureau dispatched a supervision team that arrived last night; at ten o’clock in the evening they even conducted spot checks on duty personnel at both the X town and village levels. All patrol and duty personnel at the town and village levels are requested to intensify patrols during peak periods…”

“I am asking everyone to overcome the difficulties, ensure duty posts are properly manned, strengthen patrol and control, and put a complete stop to open burning of crop straw. The city will be dispatching unannounced inspection teams, so please do not let your guard down. Hold the line for these last five days and protect the results of over three months of hard work.”

“There are only three days left of the year-round burning ban!”

Who Pays the Bill?

Sun Weimin reckoned that Village A had spent 400,000 yuan on crop straw work this year alone—covering baling, hiring people for patrols and surveillance, transporting crop straw, shredding straw, and the overnight call-up of 16 rotavators to till the fields. In late October, they spent another 80,000 yuan on a new small baler for the village, though it never got used. Most of the money came from the higher-level government, but “that is still taxpayers’ money,” he said, feeling pained. Why couldn’t that money go towards building roads and bridges, improving basic infrastructure?

Factoring in how much straw a single mu of land yields, and having personally lived through the cost of hauling straw off-site, he estimated that the agricultural company mentioned earlier, which operates the straw collection and storage centre, had spent more than 4 million yuan on transport alone.

◉ (Top) Another large-scale crop straw pile in the town where Village A is located. Locals said far more straw had been stacked here last year; it has since been cleared, but the steel-frame shed has not yet been fully erected. (Bottom) A straw collection and storage centre in another city and county in the Dongting Lake region. The straw has reportedly been transported out, and the space is temporarily let to others for storing prefabricated construction components.

But for more than a decade under the crop-straw burning ban, experience from many provinces exploring off-field removal has shown that, given the straw’s inherently low calorific value and nutritional density yet enormous volume, power plants, livestock farms, and other enterprises are not keen on purchasing it, and even less willing to pay the high transport costs.

Chen Jing, associate professor at Northwest A&F University, once conducted fieldwork in Anhui on crop straw off-field removal. He found that most straw collection and storage centres could not even achieve 30 per cent recycling of the straw within their operational area, and that government subsidy incentives consistently failed to deliver—ultimately because the margins were too thin.

When the enterprises proved unable to “collect everything that should be collected,” Sun Weimin heard that two villages in the town had found their own buyers. But even just hauling the straw from the fields onto the buyers’ trucks had cost them tens of thousands of yuan in losses.

In addition, off-field removal of crop straw still depends heavily on subsidies, and with many local governments under tight fiscal pressure, scholars estimate that sustained support is unlikely. This is consistent with what our own research found. Two interviewees confirmed to us that a local company handling straw collection and storage had not yet received its full subsidy. And the farmers in Village A and another village near Changsha who had participated in off-field removal and in-field incorporation work applied for subsidies last year, but as of early June this year, neither the city nor the county had approved them.

◉ A promotional notice at a straw collection and storage centre in Xiangyin County, Yueyang City. The owner says its collection capacity exceeds 10,000 tonnes, and this year’s selling price is 650 yuan per tonne.

In fact, in January 2025, the Standing Committee of the Hunan Provincial People’s Congress passed the Several Provisions of Hunan Province on the Comprehensive Utilisation of Crop Straw, the nation’s first provincial-level regulation governing the comprehensive utilisation of crop straw, and explored “controlled burning” of crop straw. In particular, addressing the outbreaks of pests and diseases that have followed years of straw incorporation back into the fields in Hunan, it specifically stipulates that “crop straw in no-burning zones carrying pests and diseases confirmed by quarantine inspection to require burning may be openly burned, provided that the agriculture and rural affairs and ecological environment departments of the county-level people’s government have taken safe and controllable measures.” Some commentators have seen this as a positive attempt to move the crop-straw burning ban from outright “prohibition” to “restriction”—a managed easing.

But a town official in the agriculture department revealed that the regulation had barely begun to take effect before it was shelved internally within the government system under pressure from environmental oversight. Hunan entered the “strictest” burning-ban phase in its history.

In April 2026, the rapeseed harvest came. Village A’s crop-straw burning ban, patrols, and mobilisation efforts began all over again. The village committee had bound a fresh ledger and placed it on the office desk, ready for inspection by superiors.

– This is Foodthink’s 819th original article –