Development Ideas for High-Efficiency Ecological Agriculture in China
It is projected that by 2050, the world population will increase to 9 billion, which will pose a huge challenge to global agricultural development. Whether enough food can be produced and whether food security can be guaranteed will be issues of common concern to people of all countries in the world. For decades, the Chinese people, relying on their own diligence and wisdom, have basically achieved the miracle of “feeding 21% of the world's population with 7% of the world's arable land.” At the same time, China's agriculture also faces many severe problems, and China's food security situation remains far from optimistic.
The Necessity of Developing Ecological Agriculture in China
“A large population with little land” is China's basic national condition. Moreover, in recent years China's arable land area has been declining year by year, decreasing from 1.831 billion mu in 2005 to 1.826 billion mu in 2010, and it is projected to decrease to 1.798 billion mu and 1.769 billion mu by 2015 and 2020 respectively. About 1.8 billion mu of arable land has to produce food for more than 1.3 billion mouths to feed, which is the most difficult task of any country in the world. Not only that, according to the results of the “Survey and Evaluation of Cultivated Land Quality Grades in China” published by the Ministry of Land and Resources, among China's arable land, excellent and high-grade fields account for only 32.6%, medium-grade fields account for 50.6%, and low-yield fields account for 16.7%, with the average quality of arable land in the western and northeastern regions being relatively low. The above results were obtained by comprehensively taking into account factors such as natural conditions, farming systems, infrastructure, agricultural production technology and inputs, and are relatively scientific. From this it can be seen that the area of low-yield fields in China is around 600 million mu.
At present, China's grain output comes at the cost of heavy use of chemical fertilizers, heavy use of pesticides, and massive consumption of groundwater. Agricultural environmental pollution is severe, and serious hidden dangers exist in the long run. China's total arable land accounts for 9% of the world's total, but the total amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides it consumes accounts for 35% and 20% of the world's total respectively. The average amount of chemical pesticides used per unit area is 2.5 to 5 times higher than the world level, and the area of crops contaminated by pesticide residues each year reaches 1.2 billion mu, causing serious environmental problems such as water source pollution, soil loss, river silting, marine pollution, ecological change and the spread of disease, and resulting in substantial economic losses. Although the application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides doubled crop yields over the past 40 years, it has been found in the past 20 years that while the use of chemical fertilizers continues to increase, crop yields have shown a continuously declining trend. The reason is that synthetic chemicals such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides cause the death of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia and other organic organisms in the soil and a decline in their symbiotic interaction with plants, which in turn leads to a decline in soil fertility.
The reason humanity has been able to multiply continuously and make inventions is precisely that humans have mastered the techniques and methods of producing food and grasped the patterns of crop growth through the four seasons; this is the invention of agriculture. Animal husbandry is the direct use of animals by humans, whereas crops can only yield food under reasonable conditions of water, fertilizer, air, heat, light and temperature, and among these, pests and weeds also compete with humans for resources. Agriculture is an ancient and eternal topic; without agriculture, human society would certainly be unsustainable. With five thousand years of Chinese civilization, plus prehistoric civilization, the history of humans dealing with crops spans eight or nine thousand years, and Chinese agriculture is the most advanced in the world. The fact that China's arable land has been continuously used for thousands of years without degrading is itself a miracle. However, unfortunately, since the late 1970s, we have abandoned traditional agricultural techniques and introduced the so-called achievements of the first Green Revolution, namely the use of large amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and agricultural film. The farming method of “hoeing under the noonday sun” has been replaced by machines, people have become lazy, the land has become greedy, and farmland is full of pollutants. In just a few decades, the fertility of arable land has declined markedly, the national average soil organic matter is less than 1%, and non-degradable agricultural film accumulates in farmland every year. Industrialized agriculture has already greatly shaken the foundation of our agriculture.
From the perspective of sustainable development, China's future agriculture can only take the path of ecological agriculture that “uses the land while nourishing the land” and “intensive and meticulous cultivation,” combined with certain modern equipment and ecological technologies. Therefore, to solve the food security problem, we must at least return to circular ecological agriculture. Such an agricultural approach should involve the joint participation of animals and plants, with pest control solved by physical and biological means and with little or no use of chemical methods, with animal manure becoming organic fertilizer for growing grain, establishing a complete agricultural circular biological chain. In the future, a large amount of space in China's agriculture will be devoted to making the most of straw and soil, that is, developing high-efficiency ecological circular agriculture.