In the End, They Still Burn! What Detours Did Straw Field Incorporation Take in the Northeast?

Late in April, farmers in Heilongjiang Province are busy with the spring planting. Following local farming custom, they first burn off the stubble (that is, set fire to the crop residue), then disc the land and sow. Driving along the roads, you can spot thin wisps of white smoke from a burn now and then. As for what the fields look like after the burning – charred maize root stubs, rice stubble – such sights are everywhere to be seen.

By now, the burning season is drawing to a close. Over the past month or more, crop residue across the Northeast’s farmland has been burned off field by field, becoming a significant contributor to local air pollution this spring. On 1 April, a multi-vehicle collision and fire broke out on the Suihua section of the Hehe Expressway, caused by stubble burning in the surrounding area.

The other side of the story is the farmers’ sense of relief: since last year, the ban has finally been lifted, and there is no longer any need to burn in secret, anxious and afraid. The village Party secretary, too, has breathed a sigh of relief. “Who would dare stop ordinary people from working their land?”

In the autumn and winter of 2015, severe smog engulfed the three provinces of the Northeast. Crop-residue burning was identified as a major source of pollution. And so, from the autumn of 2016, the ban on straw burning became a key political task across the Northeast. For instance, the Jilin Provincial Committee and Provincial Government personally oversaw the work, establishing a grid-based straw-burning ban system spanning the county, township and village levels, and formulating assessment measures requiring that pressure be “cascaded down through each tier, creating an implementation mechanism in which everyone shoulders responsibility”. Heilongjiang and Liaoning likewise issued dedicated plans to build grid-based accountability systems, marking a shift in the Northeast’s straw-burning ban from the old days of propaganda and mobilisation to a new phase of rigid accountability.

Strict policy means financial and labour costs. In one town in Hulan District, Harbin, a village Party secretary recalls that after each autumn harvest the village had to spend just over 10,000 yuan and hire four or five people to stand watch in the fields, day after day, to guard against burning. The village also maintained a collective account: if satellite imagery detected a fire point, money was deducted from it, and village cadres would receive linked warnings or disciplinary action.

Beyond banning burning, the government has also actively sought new outlets for crop residue. After trying measures ranging from returning residue to the soil to removing it from the field – with poor results and considerable public resentment – it has ultimately had to return to the old practice of burning. Yet there has been progress: from the unregulated burning of the past, to what policy documents now call “targeted”, “scientific” and “orderly” burning. The Ecological Environment Code, passed by the National People’s Congress this March, also features the top-level guidance that “local people’s governments at all levels shall, in a scientific and targeted manner, strengthen the organisation, guidance and management of the burning of crop residue, fallen leaves and the like”.

What ordinary people have noticed is this: the government, guided by weather forecasts, identifies days when atmospheric dispersion conditions are favourable and issues advance notice of a burning window. This information is passed down through the chain; the village Party secretary then informs the villagers, and only then does everyone burn the stubble.

From the political task spearheaded by the provincial committee in 2016 to this year’s practical “lifting” of the ban – what have Northeast farmers experienced over the ten years of detours that the straw-burning ban has taken? Why have they always resisted using crop residue? Or is it that they simply prefer to burn it all and be done with it?

Defeated by the Ridges

Our fieldwork this time centred on maize growers. Following local practice, once spring arrives and the ground thaws, the dry conditions and strong winds lead farmers to burn off the stubble. A layer of plant ash and residual stubble is then rotary-tilled into the soil, after which sowing can begin. Being compelled to return crop residue to the field adds an extra step: chopping the straw and deep ploughing it into the soil. That in turn demands a second operation – ridging.

This is a key reason why maize-residue incorporation ultimately failed. Several farming families we interviewed put it plainly: the ridges got messed up – nobody can accept that.

“Deep ploughing” means turning chopped maize stalks and root stubs into the soil. The ploughing depth typically needs to reach 30–40 cm so the straw is fully buried; otherwise seed germination and root anchorage suffer. Maize produces such a large volume of residue that both chopping and deep ploughing must be thorough. Some agricultural instruction videos specifically warn that if the straw has not been sufficiently shredded, a second pass with the machine is still needed.

After deep ploughing, the ground is left uneven, with clods of various sizes, making it impossible to sow directly. Additional operations – breaking up the clods, pressing – are needed to level the field. But the biggest problem with deep ploughing is that it obliterates the existing ridges. Neither deep ploughing nor ridge-making can be done by hand; both require specialised machinery that individual farmers cannot operate on their own.

An ordinary rotary tiller’s blades reach only about 20 cm deep, which means that to achieve deep ploughing a farmer must invest additionally in a machine fitted with a heavy plough – for instance, a large reversible mouldboard plough, costing 100,000 yuan or more. On top of that, a tractor operator charges 400 yuan per shang (15 mu) of land. In one village we visited, there are nearly 10,000 mu of farmland, so deep ploughing alone costs 260,000 yuan a year.

So to push residue incorporation forward, the government subsidises tractor operators to carry out this whole suite of services. As for deep ploughing, the farmers we met were sharply divided. In Hulan District, Harbin, farmers generally reported that deep ploughing increases soil porosity. If winter snowfall is light, the spring gales dry out the topsoil; poor soil moisture conservation hinders seedling emergence and also leads to lodging once the crops are up. When residual stubble is left in too large a proportion – not fully chopped and buried – the problem is only aggravated.

Further east, however, some farmers in Bayan County and Bin County do approve of deep ploughing. “Too much chemical fertiliser – the soil has gone completely compacted,” one elderly man said. Deep ploughing, he reasoned, at least loosens the ground. As for the problems caused by the soil becoming too loose, he believed that simply running a press roller over the field again would sort it out.

But when it comes to the final step – ridging – the farmers are unanimously opposed. Indeed, ridges not being made properly has become the single most important reason they reject residue incorporation.

Standing by the roadside and gazing at the vast tracts of bare earth stretching to the horizon during spring ploughing, one truly grasps the meaning of “vast land, few people”. But the land as farmers see it is not the same as what an outsider perceives. A stretch of several hundred mu before your eyes may be the pooled holdings of a handful – even a dozen – separate families. They delineate their plots by ridges, not by area. Not only must the number of ridges stay the same; ideally, so must the width and spacing, since the latter affects how the crops grow.

In years past, after burning the residue, farmers would drive a rotary tiller along the existing ridges, working the maize root stubs – the parts that refuse to burn – into the soil, and then sow. Only every few years, or even longer, when the village organised a collective deep ploughing, would ridges need to be re-formed; and even then, farmers usually called on a tractor operator from within the village or nearby – someone they trusted. Residue incorporation means ridges must be rebuilt every single year, and the operators who receive the government subsidy for the job are often outsiders. The ridges they produce are “big ridges here, small ridges there”. In one village in Hulan District, villagers groan at the mere mention of ridge-making.

The village Party secretary finds it a headache too: “It creates huge friction. One family’s ridges come out too wide, another’s too narrow, and next thing you know they’re blaming you – the village committee – and who can take that? If we can’t sort it out for them and it triggers a petition, what then?”

The Ridge War

On the afternoon of 30 April, by the roadside just outside Hulan District, a cluster of elderly people were gathered around the field bund, locked in a row over how to lay out the ridges. The modest stretch of land before them, as it turned out, belonged to two families with their plots run together. The electricity pole serving as the boundary marker had become the crux of the dispute. A middle-aged man on an electric scooter, Hu Shunyi, told us ruefully that he was the village Party secretary and had been called out at nine that morning to ensure fair play – yet this crowd was still no closer to a resolution.

In the middle of the crowd stood a tall man in a hat, looking to be in his fifties or sixties, who chimed in from time to time. ‘Old auntie, is that electricity pole yours?’ ‘Once you lot have this sorted, I’m starting the rotary-tilling!’

This was the tractor operator who had served the village for years. Hu Shunyi said of him that he had a sure hand and worked with great care; the villagers all trusted him. Now forced to stand by and watch, unable to get on with his job for all the arguing, he grew increasingly anxious.

In the end, one old auntie could take no more. In her leather shoes she marched right into the field, each footfall landing squarely on a ridge, counting as she went. By the time she reached the electricity pole she had counted thirty-two. Her tally gave the dispute the solid numbers it needed, and before long both sides reached an accord. The tractor operator turned to one of them and said, ‘Tonight, deposit 10,000 yuan at my place.’ He hopped onto the rotary tiller and, with a thunderous rumble, began toing and froing along the bund. The crowd scattered.

This single scene let us, as outsiders, grasp the ridges’ importance in an instant. A ridge determines whether you can squeeze in one more strip of crops, draws the boundaries between plots, and sets the rent. Typically, once the tractor operator has finished making the ridges, they are apportioned among neighbouring households according to the record ledger; only when everyone is content is the matter closed.

The sheer complexity of what goes on in the fields, the farmers’ fierce guarding of every last inch of land, the pushback that any top-down, one-size-fits-all mobilisation can trigger at the grassroots – all of it may far exceed what policy-makers in distant cities can ever imagine: if even a tractor operator hired by the farmers themselves from within the village can spark a dispute over the ridges, how much more so an outsider over whom the farmers have no say and whom they have no reason to trust?

Hu Shunyi admitted, too, that many of the tractor operators were complete amateurs – they could not even keep a ridge straight with satellite guidance. A single pass of the machine there and back, and the ridge width might vary by seven or eight centimetres, making the ridges impossible to align. Sometimes, mid-job, a family would find themselves a ridge or two short.

The Rice Grower’s Worry

Rice does not require ridging. Sister Chen, a rice grower we met, said that during the strictest years of the burning ban, all they could do was scoop the straw away by boat.

The harvester only clips off the grain panicles; the fine, soft stalks are left behind in the field. Sister Chen has never heard of any machine that chops rice straw and incorporates it, nor has anyone come to bale and collect it. All the straw is left in the field and must be scooped out by hand.

The work often cannot begin until spring. As autumn deepens and the cold sets in, hired labourers head off to work the maize fields; no one is willing to wade through the water in boots.

They use vehicles to haul the straw out, but when heavy snow soaks it through in winter, they have no choice but to scoop it out by boat. “Backbreaking work, utterly exhausting.” Workers charge no less than 200 yuan a day, sometimes up to 280 yuan. Five or six workers, a few boats, a full week of labour – all extra costs that fall squarely on the farmers.

Even so, the straw is never fully cleared. Sister Chen says they can only force the rice stalks and the lowest stubs into the ground when rotary-tilling in spring, and even then, “one step down and it’s all crunch – crunch – nothing but straw.” Once the weather turns warm, straw soaking in the soft, rotting mud begins to decay and bubble. More than one rice farmer has told us that hydrogen sulphide gas produced by anaerobic decomposition of the straw “poisons” the rice – the roots turn black from the fumes, and seedlings die.

In soil like that, Sister Chen says, transplanted seedlings cannot take root, and pest infestations have multiplied. When straw burning was still permitted, at most one or two rounds of pesticide were needed per season; now they need six or seven.

The stricter the burning ban, the more chemical fertiliser is used. In the two years before last, Sister Chen applied 10–11 bags of fertiliser per shang. Starting last year, the burning policy began to relax; after burning the field, she used only 8 bags. “Plant ash does count for something,” she said.

Off the Field, No Easier

In fact, beyond field incorporation, baling straw up and shipping it away for use as fuel, compost or growing substrate is another possible avenue. Straw resource utilisation should have had a vast market in the Northeast – the heating season lasts nearly half the year, and several village officials and villagers said that power plants and heating plants are more than happy to collect and burn straw.

But in the several counties and districts east of Harbin that we visited, just as the mere mention of ridges stirs up grievances, the mention of baling draws a similar wellspring of complaints from farmers.

The reason turns out to be as simple, and nearly as absurd, as “the ridges weren’t made properly”: baling simply cannot be done cleanly. Normally, tractor operators are subsidised based on the area they bale. The reality is this: when a straw pickup baler enters a maize field, it always leaves behind scattered fragments of root stubble. These fragments are too sparse to form a continuous layer, so even when farmers try to burn them off in one go, the fire simply will not catch. They have no choice but to hire workers to rake them up by hand. Workers are paid 100 yuan a day, and because the fragments have been pressed into the soil, they cannot clear even a single mu in a full day.

Village Party secretary Hu Shunyi recalls that about six years ago the village began organising unified baling and off-field removal. To deal with the root stubble left behind in the soil, villagers raked the fields over and again. “The seedlings had already grown this tall” – he spread his thumb and forefinger apart to show the distance – ‘and they were still picking up straw bit by bit from the ground! The farmers were furious – “You tilled the ground for me, but I have to go and collect seven times!”‘

Having received not a single fen in return, only losing money on labour costs, no farmer was willing to have their straw baled and carted away any longer. Sometimes, before a baler even arrived, villagers would sneak out and light a fire. In Bin County, there were even tractor operators from outside hoping to earn the off-field removal subsidy, but the locals kept a tight watch during the day – ‘the only option was to sneak onto the farmers’ fields at dead of night to bale.’

Another reason farmers oppose baling is that the balers and trucks rolling in compact the arable land, pressing it down rock-hard. They then have to till the soil loose again themselves before they can sow.

An elderly farmer in Bayan County recalled that in the early years, off-field removal was actually introduced before field incorporation. But once baling began, farmer opposition was so fierce that some, dreading the operators’ return to bale again, rushed to burn their straw before the machines could arrive. ‘The money goes to other people; all that’s left for us old farmers is trouble.’ he said.

He experienced one year of failed off-field removal. The following year, the government learned its lesson and switched to deep ploughing incorporation, but whether the tractor operator skimped on fuel to cut corners or some other technical issue was to blame, the deep ploughing fell short – maize seeds landed on top of the straw, could not take root, and no seedlings emerged. That year’s yield was only about 900 jin per mu (a normal year brings 2,100–2,200 jin) – a total, catastrophic loss.

After that, the old man refused point-blank to let the government touch his land and went back to burning straw.

Data published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2018 indirectly reflected the difficulty of implementing off-field removal nationwide: the national straw field-incorporation area stood at 743 million mu, while the pickup-and-baling area was only 88 million mu – the proportion going back to the field far exceeded that removed from it.

Who Is Still Sticking with Field Incorporation?

Given all these factors, although the tasks of off-field removal and field incorporation are assigned to every village, they are difficult to push through. “Farmers don’t have to spend a penny, but they still don’t want it,” Hu Shunyi summarised.

The strictness with which the straw burning ban is enforced varies from place to place. Most of the farmers we met on this trip, having endured the troubles brought on by field incorporation or off-field removal, have gone back to burning their straw; a small handful have always been burn-and-be-done with it, sneaking fires even when the ban was at its strictest.

Grassroots departments have gradually adjusted their strategies in step with this. In the end, before each spring planting, there is still a two-day window period – notified in advance – during which farmers are permitted to burn off their fields. On those two days, even the Environmental Protection Committee (the township-level environmental protection department) turns a blind eye. “Who would dare stop ordinary people from farming?”

It is said that the state farms are still sticking with field incorporation, but private farmers all choose to burn. We had hoped to find farmers who recognised the benefits of returning straw to the field and still did so of their own accord, but on this trip we did not meet a single one.

This, too, is a rather perplexing matter: straw field incorporation is promoted as a good deed that benefits both the nation and the people – boosting soil fertility, carbon sequestration and emission reduction, raising yields and incomes – yet farmers remain unconvinced. They believe that even with proper deep ploughing, returning straw to the field does not increase yields; they still have to apply just as much fertiliser and spray just as much pesticide (if not more). And if the ploughing is not done properly, not a single seedling emerges.

In short, straw field incorporation has brought them no agricultural benefit, the subsidies never reach their hands, and all it has left them with is a mountain of trouble.

Moreover, the volume and characteristics of straw differ from crop to crop. “Soybean straw is sparse – returning it is no problem. But maize, no. The straw is too thick; it has to be burned. Otherwise the corn borers overwinter inside the stalks, and the next year there are swarms of them,” a farmer in Fuyuan summarised.

Research has found that the rapid expansion of maize cultivation across the Northeast over the past two decades is linked to the large-scale importation of soybeans after China’s accession to the WTO. Domestic soybeans could not compete, so farmers switched to the more lucrative maize – a shift that has further compounded the difficulty of straw field incorporation.

Those still doing field incorporation exist only in villagers’ fragmented recollections – either their land borders a major road or lies on the outskirts of a town, where enforcement is too strict to allow burning; or they have connections that enable them to collect subsidies. Of course, since subsidies go to tractor operators rather than growers, such people tend to be large-scale farmers who both own farm machinery and have contracted extensive land holdings.

West of Bin County, we overheard several villagers discussing one such big farmer’s business acumen. He had set up a grain cooperative and contracted large tracts of land from multiple households to grow maize, soybeans and other crops. He had been doing deep ploughing incorporation for two or three years running and had been featured in the local media.

In the villagers’ view, this big farmer persists with deep ploughing solely to claim subsidies. And for someone of his scale, the subsidies available are not limited to one – winner takes all, they say. The villagers tick them off one by one: straw field incorporation – a subsidy; maize–soybean rotation – a subsidy; wide-ridge planting – a subsidy; large-scale agricultural machinery – “all subsidised by the state”: rice transplanters, harvesters… “They’ve got their ‘people’ – they know where to go (to apply for) subsidies.”

But not every subsidy makes it into the farmers’ pockets. In a village we visited in Hulan District, the agricultural machinery cooperative has already shut down – in the ploughing and ridging process, the cooperative was responsible for hiring tractor operators, providing equipment, and fronting the costs of fuel and labour. Village Party secretary Guo Quanshan said that the district’s deep ploughing subsidy has been delayed for so long that, after the cooperative fronted expenses for five or six years, it is now owed several million yuan in arrears. Even if a farmer wants to return straw to the field now, there is no one left to provide the service.

We Just Want to Burn

“Write this down: the people of the Northeast are saying – we just want to burn!” After chatting with us, more than one farmer or village party secretary issued this defiant declaration.

Sister Chen recalled the spectacle of the entire village rallying to burn straw: based on the weather forecast, the village would issue a unified notice for the all-clear. If there was only one day, each household would round up more relatives to help. They would set up torches and light them with the wind at their backs. If they wanted speed, they would splash oil onto the fields.

But Guo Quanshan also remembered a year when the wind was strong: the straw fire from a nearby village grew too fierce, swept into their own settlement, and killed three people.

In late April this year, straw burning near Harbin airport disrupted take-offs and landings, causing widespread delays. On another occasion, a straw fire in Jilin “blazed red” across the landscape, forcing high-speed trains to suspend service and leading to the detention of villagers involved. Real-time air pollution data and satellite remote sensing also showed that, this spring, several cities across the Northeast experienced severe air pollution episodes caused by straw burning.

Several village party secretaries, driven to distraction by the straw-burning problem, also felt that the issue called for a channel rather than a dam. “The more you forbid burning, the more anxious people get – they sneak fires.” The result was that everyone, fearing they would miss spring planting, burned helter-skelter like headless flies – extremely dangerous in any strong wind. Now burning is permitted, but farmers must follow the unified schedule set from above. Knowing that their planting will not be held up, they are far more at ease.

But do all the benefits touted in policy briefings for straw field incorporation – loosening the soil, replenishing organic matter, breathing new life back into the black soil – vanish with a single fire? Ten years of lessons from straw field incorporation, and we have learned far too little from them.

After our trip through the Northeast, Foodthink continued south and encountered a completely different story of straw field incorporation on the North China Plain. The stark regional differences in how straw is used give one a profound sense of just how complex farming realities are, how enormous the impact of policy can be, and how difficult it is for farmers to manoeuvre within such a narrow range of choices. We welcome your comments – share what you have seen of straw use in reality.

– This is Foodthink’s 808th original article –

Hu Shunyi, Sister Chen and Guo Quanshan are pseudonyms used in this article

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs were taken by the authors

Editor: Lingyu

Layout: Minglin

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