Who Dragged Down the Standard of “High-Standard Farmland”?
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer in Meishan, shook his head in anguish watching the paddy fields in his village left unharvested. But these fields were no longer his, nor the villagers’—they belonged to “the boss”: a large-scale land contractor from elsewhere who had taken over through land transfer. By the end of 2024, hundreds of mu of land from several village production teams had been consolidated into a single transfer deal and converted into “high-standard farmland” (hereafter “high-standard fields”).
In the villagers’ eyes, however, these neglected plots could hardly live up to the name “high-standard”. Not until after the spring equinox did the boss finally sow paddy seeds in a perfunctory rush. Zhao Lishun described what he remembered of the sowing: handful after handful of seeds, far too densely packed, without any seedling nursery, simply flung into the dry fields for direct seeding, as if they were free. He was baffled—what could possibly grow from that?
By autumn, the harvest turned out better than the villagers had expected. They guessed the boss might have chosen a good variety, but more likely he had simply pumped in too much chemical fertiliser and herbicide. “The drone just flies straight over,” one villager said, waving a hand to sketch its path.
Unfortunately, relentless rain through October delayed the harvest. The boss did not seem as anxious about the yield as a smallholder farmer would be. With piles of paddy already going mouldy, a tracked tractor from out of town was not brought in until 8 November, splashing noisily into the waterlogged, soft fields after the rain. Some lodged, droop-headed rice was already beyond rescue. Several plots were never harvested at all. The boss left word: whatever isn’t collected, help yourselves.
The paddy people salvaged—many dared feed it only to the chickens.
Aside from the slapdash management, Zhao Lishun thought the field bunds had been built far too high. He once pointed, pained, at a plot that was both cracked dry and waterlogged. The official language calls high-standard fields “contiguous and concentrated, with well-equipped infrastructure”, but on this plot so much water had pooled that the tall bunds had already been washed out. “It’s not a proper field anymore!” he cried. He wanted to know: the men behind the excavators had never farmed a day in their lives—why not ask the old local farmers how the fields should be reshaped?
His observations fell a long way from the stated aims of high-standard fields: “levelled land in contiguous, concentrated plots, with well-equipped infrastructure and supporting facilities, fertile soil, a healthy ecology, and strong disaster resilience—land that yields reliably through drought and flooding alike, maintaining high and stable output in step with modern agricultural production and management.”
The No. 1 Central Documents over the years have repeatedly called for accelerating the construction of high-standard fields, treating them as an essential requirement for safeguarding food security. This security works on two fronts: first, boosting grain output by improving arable-land quality; second, promoting large-scale operations through land transfer to tackle the question of “who will farm in the future”.
China has now built 1 billion mu of high-standard fields—two-thirds of the nation’s 1.546 billion mu of permanent basic farmland. In April 2025, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee issued a document aiming to convert all qualified permanent basic farmland into high-standard fields by 2035.
Yet the “high standards” in red-header government documents have been reduced to “low standards” once they reach the paddy. The reshaped soils and water systems do not always meet practical needs and have even become a reason for farmland abandonment—this absurd drama is unfolding across many parts of the country.
The land transfer that went hand in hand with the conversion has also widened the distance between villagers and their land. In several villages around Chengdu, the village committee called on each production brigade to pool the villagers’ plots, which the village collective cooperative then transferred en bloc to an “anchor company”—the anchor company, in turn, paid villagers a land-transfer fee while looking for suitable parties to take on the contracts. Some villagers grieved that their own plots were rendered unrecognisable after conversion; others embraced the change with ease, lured by rents of 600 to 800 yuan per mu.
Yet merging small fields into large ones does not automatically mean higher yields or better efficiency. Whoever ends up running the big fields, once they find farming neither easy nor profitable, they walk away—and the cost of breaking the large fields back down to return them to smallholders is enormous. So who is to be held responsible for the land and for food security? And to what extent has the conversion truly achieved the “high-standard” planting it promised?
I. Small Fields Merge to Large, Good Soil Turns to Bad
Four years after the high-standard fields were completed, in 2025, the village collective of Village B near Chengdu had to hire workers to re-level the land—over 300 mu of paddy, at more than 300 yuan per mu. Nearly 100,000 yuan went out in one fell swoop, and spring planting was delayed. The village Party secretary said this was already the second round of reshaping after the original high-standard conversion. “Before the second round it was even worse—this little hollow of water here, that little hollow there,” she said.
Xu Runtian has long worked in agricultural extension in Sichuan. He argued that unlike the sandy loam of the plains, the hilly areas of Sichuan are mostly clay, with smaller soil pores, making levelling far harder. It was only through years of careful tending by farmers that the plots had developed their gently varied, levelled surfaces; given the sheer scale of high-standard fields, it was utterly unrealistic to expect an excavator operator to sculpt such a surface “going by feel alone.”
In Village A, where pear trees were being grown, more than 30 of the 1,000 mu on slopes had long been trapped in that same state of undrainable waterlogging. Zhang Xiaoqin, who works in the orchard, said the water was worse in summer. The boss had dug extra drainage channels and the workers had tried every trick to drain the fields, yet in this small stretch of land the pear trees still drowned and no machine could get through. Before the conversion, this area had been where the village’s rice grew best of all.
Visiting villages across Sichuan, Xu Runtian found that with small fields merged into large ones, anyone who wants to farm must now dig new drainage channels after the high-standard conversion; otherwise water simply cannot drain away. If the contracting company does not do the ditching, the job falls to the village collective or individual villagers.
Merging fields typically goes hand in hand with soil reworking. According to the 2013 National Plan for High-Standard Farmland Construction, reshaping plots must first safeguard soil fertility: the fertile topsoil needs to be stripped and replaced, the effective soil layer thickness must reach at least 50 cm, and the plough layer at least 20 cm. Effective soil layer thickness has long been a basic criterion for the final inspection of high-standard fields. In practice, however, meeting these standards is hard.
Several village Party secretaries and major growers in Zhijin County, Guizhou, told Foodthink that during the high-standard conversion, excavators turned the good soil down and brought raw subsoil up to the surface, while the 3,000 jin of organic matter per mu required by regulation was nowhere to be seen. “They’ve destroyed every scrap of good soil the ordinary folk had left. You can’t grow rice, you can’t grow maize. All you can do is let it go and watch it grow weeds,” one Party secretary lamented. They felt the policy’s original intent was sound, but in execution it had gone sour.
II. Engineering Thinking Hits the Wall of Agriculture: More Technology or More Corruption?
In Meishan, Zhao Lishun’s village also had two pumped irrigation stations built the previous spring. But he had never seen water come out of them. In the worst of the spring drought, villagers still had to draw water from the river themselves, and an electric pump burned out.
In mid-June 2024, Henan was gripped by severe drought. Journalists visiting ten villages in Xiayi County at random found that the motorised boreholes in the high-standard fields were generally not producing water. Some simply had no electricity supply; in others the pipes had not been properly buried. Desperate for water, farmers had to strip the smart irrigation equipment off the boreholes and revert to old methods of pumping and irrigating; some even used electric three-wheelers to recharge the borehole pumps, managing to water just four mu in two days. After more than ten days of unbroken drought, a heavy rain finally broke the crisis.
A kiwifruit grower in Shaanxi also had drip irrigation installed in his orchard as part of the high-standard conversion. This was the third time the orchard’s channel irrigation had been overhauled—after the Water Resources Bureau’s “water-saving irrigation project” and the NDRC’s “eco-garden programme.” “We joke and say: go ahead and install it fast, we’ll dismantle it fast too, and you go collect your money,” he told Foodthink. The key to drip irrigation, he explained, is pressurising and filtering the water source, yet the contractors simply laid pipes drawing from the open channels—”It’s like wanting to inflate a tyre when there’s no compressed-air tank.” These armchair-planned pipes could only end up scrapped.
One of the aims of high-standard field conversion is to secure reliable yields through drought and flooding alike, but in reality, shoddy construction can leave farmers even more vulnerable to extreme weather.
In recent years, cases of shoddy construction and abandoned, overgrown high-standard fields have repeatedly made headlines across the country. Together with every example above, they point to one possibility: the room for corruption inherent in a top-down, multi-layered subcontracting system built on the project-based model.
According to survey data disclosed by the People’s Political Consultative Daily, the average construction cost per mu of high-standard fields nationwide in 2020 was 3,046 yuan, rising above 5,000 yuan in some hilly and mountainous areas. In the memories of both Xu Runtian and Village A’s retired Party secretary, the funds for high-standard conversion that town officials had mentioned were even higher.
In Binhai County, Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, the 2022 construction of 115,000 mu of high-standard fields involved a total investment of 349 million yuan. The following year, CCTV’s annual 3.15 Gala reported that the concrete pipes used for diversion and irrigation in the county’s high-standard fields commonly had exposed rebar and damage, failing to meet national standards. The reason: to cut costs, contractors simply chose cheap, sub-standard non-standard pipe, then bought a few lengths of national-standard pipe for the inspectors to test.
In 2024, journalists from Yicai found that reports from at least 12 provinces had flagged irregularities in the construction of high-standard fields, including fields sited within forest and grassland areas, tender documents laced with conditions to restrict potential bidders, the absence of hydrological surveys before drilling agricultural boreholes, false reporting to defraud fiscal funds, and plots left idle and abandoned.
These construction problems are passed along like a game of pass-the-parcel, ultimately becoming a predicament for grassroots governance. In Village A, the retired Party secretary said the high-standard field project dragged on for years before anyone signed off on the final inspection. ‘They tried to hand it over but couldn’t unload it—the contractors hadn’t been paid in full, the village was in an uproar about a half-finished project—this wasn’t done right, that wasn’t done right—and the government didn’t seem willing to take it on either.’ Afterwards, the contractors came back to the village for patch-up repairs.
According to a study by Guo Xiaoming and other scholars, high-standard farmland across the country commonly suffers from a disconnect between those who build, use, and maintain it—and once the builders have left, the duty of upkeep is effectively “stranded” with the village committee.
The study notes that once a high-standard field is completed, it is typically accepted by the county-level agriculture and rural affairs department. The resulting assets—farmland roads, water-conservancy facilities, and so on—must be handed over to the township government, which then formally establishes and transfers ownership rights to the village collective based on the project’s actual construction status. The study also cited a figure from a National Audit Office report: In 2023, 2,761 agricultural infrastructure projects across 46 counties in 16 provinces, built with 6.929 billion yuan in investment, had been left idle due to missing supporting facilities, an emphasis on construction over maintenance, and similar problems.
The source from a central province familiar with the land and resources system, mentioned earlier, also told Foodthink that payments for many high-standard projects in the province remained unpaid, and that numerous officials and contractors involved had been taken away by the relevant authorities for investigation.
After observing how high-standard fields operate in multiple locations, rural affairs researcher Chen Jingjing concluded: on the surface there are standards, procedures, and oversight, but in practice it is all theatre—everyone is “performing” to conform to a set of correct, modern requirements. During Foodthink’s visits, we found that whether it was a village Party secretary, a production brigade leader, or an ordinary villager, at the grassroots level there was no way to course-correct this engineered “performance”.
III. Is Scaling Up the Key to Improving Agricultural Efficiency?
Yet large-scale operations do not necessarily improve agriculture’s overall efficiency.
Of the many villages Foodthink visited, Village B was the only one still farming and operating on a collective basis after its high-standard conversion. The village has plenty of land—over 5,000 mu—and a workforce of six or seven hundred people who remain in the village. The Party secretary has served in the role for twelve years. After four years of running collective operations, the secretary laid out the planting accounts since the high-standard conversion.
At the end of 2021, the village put forward 800 mu of high-standard farmland for conversion, sowing two crops of grain each year. ‘With the plots made bigger, we thought mechanised planting would save money, save labour, and make it easier to find workers,’ the Party secretary explained.
But once the fields were no longer farmed under the household responsibility system, even though less manpower was needed, the team’s skill in field management was put to a sterner test. In 2021, 550 mu of soybeans under collective management—the acreage was simply too large to supervise properly—were hit by a pest outbreak in the first crop, and not a single bean was saved.
On top of that, because, as mentioned earlier, excavators had stripped away the fertile topsoil, all 350 mu of paddy ran at a loss, yielding only around 200 jin per mu. Under the same drought conditions, where topsoil had not been damaged by the high-standard conversion and management was more attentive, villagers growing rice on their own plots could still achieve 800 jin per mu.
Complex agricultural production tests management and experience. In fact, in the four years before 2021, Village B had also brought in outside contractors to lease land for lotus ponds, but after three or four years the boss’s earnings no longer even covered the 600-yuan-per-mu rent—so he ‘took off.’
From 2023, the village collective adjusted its management model—handing field management back to the production cooperatives, with each cooperative head organising operations in exchange for a management fee of 30 yuan per mu plus a share of the harvest. That autumn, paddy yields reached 800 to 900 jin per mu.
The planting area grew year by year, but the secretary candidly admitted that even at the thousand-mu scale, in the best season, the profit barely topped 300,000 yuan. It is easy to see that for an outsider clutching several million yuan and looking for business opportunities in the countryside, the rate of return in agriculture is simply no match for industry or the service sector.
Worth noting is that Village B also applied for large-scale planting subsidies covering nearly 2,000 mu—200 yuan per mu for rice, 350 yuan for intercropping maize with soybeans, and 200 to 300 yuan per mu for wheat. These subsidies accounted for the other half of grain-planting profits.
‘I just love earning state subsidies,’ the Party secretary told us with a knowing smile.
IV. In the End, Who Picks Up the Pieces: The Boss, the Villagers, or Someone Else?
More than one villager mentioned that several of the fruit-company bosses were always “having rows” (arguing) as year-end approached, to the point where shareholders had to front the money to pay workers’ wages. It was hard to see how anyone could be turning a profit.
When no suitable “boss” is willing to take on a contract, the anchor company still has to keep paying villagers their land-transfer fees.
In Village C, Xu Runtian said, roughly a year or two after the high-standard conversion was completed, the land was handed back to the village committee. Today, the anchor company is still paying, but increasingly slowly. “Whether the money arrives or not—I wouldn’t know anymore,” one elderly villager joked. “At the start, when the land was first contracted, there was no delay—payment came in that same year. By the second year, it came in mid-year. Now? It’s all talk.”
As for the new boss in Meishan who arrived, harvested for three days, then left—many plots still sitting empty and unseeded—Xu Runtian said he had seen the same pattern in other villages: seeds sown and then abandoned, with no harvest ever taken. He suspected it was usually because the money from selling the paddy wouldn’t even cover the cost of hiring people to cut it.
Running alongside the distortion of high-standard projects is the erosion of each village’s capacity for shared governance.
Partly, this is because “small fields becoming large fields” has destroyed the original field-bund boundaries and plot layouts; some plots have been taken over by roads and water facilities and can no longer be returned to the villagers. Xu Runtian has seen this scene in many places: high-standard fields left unclaimed after conversion, and without a local figure stepping in to organise and coordinate, villagers find it very hard to resume cultivation on their own initiative.
Nearby Village D, being close to the city’s built-up area, was notified the very year of its high-standard conversion that its land might face expropriation. So no company dared take on a contract; the villagers never received a land-transfer fee, yet the fields lay abandoned for over three years.
A villager who later joined Village D’s village committee recalled that, before the land was brought back into use, weeds had grown so thick they stood head-high. Under the national policy prohibiting farmland abandonment, the committee led everyone in clearing the weeds and used an excavator to carve new drainage channels down the middle of the merged large fields; in 2024, new drainage pipes were laid. Re-engineering the land cost over 100,000 yuan.
Meanwhile, in Village A, the pear orchard boss’s contract expires in three years. Will he leave, and how will the land be divided back? “They (the anchor company) will definitely have to figure something out and give us an answer,” Zhang Xiaoqin said.
On the other hand, once some villagers grew accustomed to working for wages while simply “sitting back” to collect land-transfer fees, fissures and divides began to spread between generations and among villagers with different interests.
Villages A, C, and D, visited around Chengdu, had tender documents out as early as 2017 or 2018, making them among the first areas in Sichuan to undergo high-standard conversion. In Village A, when the newly built field bunds began to crack, villagers stopped patching them on their own initiative. “Nobody’s farming anymore anyway.” In Village C, after the anchor company “gave up on saving the land,” the village committee lacked the capacity to organise large-scale production, and some neglected water infrastructure was simply forgotten.
Teams 1 and 2 of Village A had once refused to take part in the high-standard conversion; a few elderly farmers took on contracts for the land and insisted on farming it themselves. But now they have grown too old to work the land. Everyone has come to understand that the policy benefits have come and gone; no boss is coming back.” The young ones blame them—why didn’t they take the contract back then, why didn’t they go along with the conversion?” the old Party secretary said with a wry smile.
The villagers can see it all plainly: the village’s workforce shrinks year by year, and conversion and transfer are irreversible directions. But once the “large field” system malfunctions, readjusting costs far more. And the owners of the “small fields” have gradually lost both their local farming know-how and their sense of identity as growers. Faced with poorly reshaped soil and water conditions, low grain-planting returns, and poor management, both the bosses and the smallholders find it easy to simply “walk away from the plough.”
When high-standard fields, which are supposed to shoulder the burden of food security, enter the complex reality of agriculture, to what extent are they suited to engineering-style management? How is corruption to be rooted out across the long chain of operation, management, and maintenance, while ensuring that productivity improves and the system accommodates the complex topography of hills and mountains? Have high-standard fields truly become a safeguard for food security, or merely an ATM for agricultural subsidies? At this two-thirds point in the conversion process, these questions still demand more thoughtful answers.
Editors: Lingyu, Tianle