Improve the quality of cultivated land and stop "farming the fields of our children and grandchildren to grow this season's grain"

With less than 10% of the world's cultivated land, it feeds one fifth of the world's population. This is both a great achievement of Chinese agriculture and a story full of helplessness and hardship. The national condition of many people and little land has kept China's agricultural production on a model of high input and high output, and resources such as cultivated land have long been used at high intensity and beyond capacity. "Soil fertility" is being increasingly overdrawn, highlighting the hidden danger of "farming the fields of our children and grandchildren to grow this season's grain."

The 2015 No. 1 Central Document proposed that we must quickly shift from extensive management that mainly pursues output and relies on resource consumption to intensive development that gives equal weight to quantity, quality and efficiency, focuses on improving competitiveness, focuses on agricultural science and technology innovation, and focuses on sustainability, and take a modern agricultural development path featuring efficient output, safe products, resource conservation and environmental friendliness.

In 2014, China's total grain output reached 1,214.2 billion jin, achieving a historic "eleventh consecutive increase." But behind the consecutive years of bumper grain harvests lies excessive reliance on material resources such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Data show that China's chemical fertilizer use has now reached one third of the world's total, and chemical fertilizer and pesticide use exceeds the world average by 70%. Because of the excessive input of these means of production and improper handling methods, agriculture has now surpassed industry to become China's largest non-point source pollution industry.

At the same time, long-term "carrying a heavy load while moving forward" has also caused the quality of cultivated land to decline continuously, causing farmland to become "harder and thinner the more it is planted." According to Zeng Yande, Director of the Planting Industry Management Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, China's low- and medium-yield fields account for 70% of the total cultivated land area, and the area of cultivated land with degraded quality accounts for more than 40%.

Increasing grain output must not come at the expense of cultivated land quality. The No. 1 Central Document made comprehensive arrangements for work including delimiting permanent basic farmland, coordinating implementation of the national high-standard farmland construction master plan, implementing actions to protect and improve cultivated land quality, and promoting the reuse of topsoil stripped from cultivated land occupied for construction, reflecting a far-sighted layout of "storing grain in the land."

"Agriculture is different from industry; it is the most direct ecological industry, and ecological carrying capacity must be considered." Zhu Lizhi, a researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Development of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, believes that while paying attention to "above-ground" production, we must also pay attention to "below-ground" productivity, attach great importance to problems in some cultivated land such as declines in organic matter, declines in soil physical and chemical properties, and damage to soil microbial diversity, avoid the depletion of below-ground productivity, and leave room for the sustainable development of agriculture.

Improving the quality of cultivated land cannot focus only on the land itself; it also requires restoring the entire agricultural ecological environment. According to Tang Ke, Director of the Science, Technology and Education Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, China will vigorously promote technical measures such as soil testing and formulated fertilization, integrated water and fertilizer management, unified prevention and control of crop diseases and insect pests, and green prevention and control. It will strive to achieve zero growth in the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides by 2020. At the same time, it will basically achieve resource utilization of livestock and poultry manure and crop straw, and basically achieve effective recovery and treatment of discarded agricultural film and other measures, promoting the development of modern ecological circular agriculture.