China Expands Farming on Deserts, Mountains and Oceans

China is gearing up to grow food in its deserts, on its mountains and in the ocean. Propagandists show beautiful pictures and recite fake statistics, but no outsiders will be allowed to monitor these ecologically risky ventures. The plan envisions chains of mechanized farms and fisheries feeding warehouses, processing plants, and retailers controlled by industrial conglomerates to replace chaotic hordes of impoverished aging peasants, nomads, fishing boats and mountain dwellers collecting wild plants. 

The 2025 communist party "Document No. 1" on rural policy priorities called for building "a diversified food supply system" by building deep-sea "marine ranches", creating "forest granaries" in mountainous areas, improve the edible fungus industry, and promote the cultivation of algae as part of China's "big food concept" and "big agriculture concept." These will likely be included in new 5-year plans to be issued in 2026.

The initiative to ramp up grain output in Xinjiang is a headline project. Last year this blog reported on China's celebration of Xinjiang for exceeding its targeted grain output of 22 million metric tons in 2024 a year after it was designated as a "national reserve granary", a status that comes with numerous subsidies and political status. Last month the Food and Commodity Reserves Administration held a video conference promising to invest in infrastructure for procuring, storing, processing and distributing grain in Xinjiang with the goal of building up the region as a major national supply base for agricultural and livestock products. The project will utilize the "aid to Xinjiang" platform (援疆平台) that matches up companies, bureaucratic entities and universities in rich eastern provinces with counterparts in Xinjiang to establish processing and sales networks there, invest in Xinjiang's grain storage and logistics facilities, provide training and R&D, and create Xinjiang food brands. Entities involved include COFCO, Food and Commodity Reserve Bureaus in Sichuan and Henan Provinces, a food company in Shandong, and a technical university in Henan. Others attending the video conference included Sinograin, ChemChina, Beidahuang Nongken Group, China Rongtong Asset Management Group, CITIC Construction, and JD.com.

This year's Xinjiang grain output was not as stellar as last year's, but it was one of only 3 regions that increased its grain output by more than 100,000 metric tons (others were Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia, also on China's periphery). Xinjiang had the highest grain yield per hectare of any region.

In March 2025 a proposal to build "grain production bases" in arid regions of the Loess Plateau was made to the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference by a professor at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University. This region of North Central China at the western end of the Great Wall is known for brown sandy soil prone to erosion and crushing poverty. The proposed project would harvest rainwater, use irrigation techniques, cover fields with plastic to prevent evaporation, fully mechanize farming, apply Beidou (China's GPS) to control farming equipment and application of water and fertilizer, and integrate crop and livestock farming. The professor called for including the project in the 15th 5-year plan to cover 2.67 million hectares with a goal of raising grain output by 4 million metric tons. 

In August, China's agriculture ministry responded to the proposal by explaining that the ministry has been conducting similar work in the Loess region and will include elements of the proposal in the new 5-year plan. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs plans to promote water-saving agriculture in the Loess region, build "high-standard farmland", resolve drought-induced water shortages, share information between meteorological, water conservancy, and emergency management departments, and scale up farms by nurturing "family farms" and cooperatives, and create industrial chains led by big companies. Shaanxi Province's water management department described its plans to upgrade irrigation to create a "second granary" in the province. Last winter and spring the Loess region experienced a serious drought that impacted wheat production, but authorities insisted they had averted declines in output by crash irrigation programs. Data released this month show Shaanxi and neighboring Ningxia were the only two provinces that had a decline in grain output in 2025.  

Another initiative to create a "plateau granary" on the Tibetan Plateau of western Sichuan and Tibet has been underway for several years. The Tibetan climate is not suited to rice, wheat or corn, so authorities upgraded highland barley and potatoes--common crops in Tibetan regions--to be included in the official definition of "grain" crops for food security evaluations. Last year the academies of agricultural science in Chongqing and Sichuan Province agreed to supply seeds to grow a variety of broad beans in a Tibetan area of Sichuan. In Tibet, highland barley production was revived by planting improved seed and using "earthworm compost" to treat salinized soil. Mechanized planters were used to expand rapeseed production in an area of Tibet. Tibet and neighboring Qinghai have the smallest grain output of all Province-level regions (excluding the Beijing and Shanghai municipalities) and their grain production increased only marginally in 2025.

China's industrialized food production is also moving offshore. Buoys and nets stretching to the horizon and big fishing boats are features of a "blue granary" of marine farming off the coast of Shandong Province, one of 169 national-level "marine ranches." The "Changdao Marine Ecological Civilization Comprehensive Experimental Zone" raises oysters in cages over a 467-hectare patch of ocean off the coast of Rongcheng City in Shandong Province. A manager emphasizes the stable profits of factory-style cage-farming and low labor requirements of 4 workers to produce 1 million fish. The project is run by a subsidiary of CIMC, a state-owned shipping container conglomerate that also builds boats and makes IT equipment for high-tech monitoring and mapping. Securities Times' description of other cage-farming and kelp-breeding ventures also highlighted a specially built vessel to harvest krill in the Arctic.

These initiatives are part of Xi Jinping's vision for national food security. He views himself as a new (and perhaps better) incarnation of Mao Zedong who was also obsessed with the possibility of war over Taiwan (and with the Soviets) and consolidating control over Tibetan, Uighur, Manchurian and Mongolian regions the communists had conquered. Mao was obsessed with "modernization", put excessive trust in "science" that he didn't understand, and his paranoia drove him to build underground tunnels and to move industry to the hinterland. 

China's 1950s-era "Great Leap Forward" claimed to have made scientific breakthroughs that eliminated scarcity and created huge improvements in grain output. Xi Jinping's plan to produce crops in deserts, mountains and oceans also relies on purported scientific breakthroughs in seeds, "smart" farming, and machinery. Xinjiang's military-run Production Corps claims they have raised production by intercropping corn and wheat and by increasing planting density of winter wheat. "Smart" farming will monitor everything and automatically turn irrigation pipes, sprinklers, sprayers and heaters on and off. Irrigation experts have supposedly figured out how to bring irrigation water to places where crops have never been viable before. 

China's1950s Great Leap Forward put excessive faith in science, comparing high-tech farming to the Soviet Sputnik satellites

China's farming now relies on the currently fashionable "smart" technology, promising to achieve great productivity gains by using mostly unproven technology made by Chinese companies.

The Communist Party's obsession with secrecy is the most dangerous feature. No one knows anything about actual production except what is shown in staged propaganda photos. Visitors are only allowed to see model farms on tours guided by foreign affairs officials. During the Great Leap Forward city people and most officials in Beijing did not know people in the countryside were actually starving. Statistics reported fantastic increases in grain output, so officials were ordered to procure more grain and export it to Eastern Europe to buy industrial and military gear. 

Because of the obsession with secrecy, no one can verify that technologies are working. No one can verify that statistics provide an accurate portrayal of production and use of land, water, and soil quality.

Secrecy security meeting held for agricultural technicians in Chongqing during 2024.
The agricultural extension network will be used to disseminate secret information.

Moreover, the Chinese system has built-in incentives to embellish progress. Agricultural projects are funded by government subsidies and loans to Chinese companies that build and run the projects and sell the IT equipment, tractors, drones, fishing vessels, and infrastructure. Local governments and companies, therefore, have incentive to report great progress to keep the money flowing. 

An example of the tendency toward hidden corruption and shoddy implementation is a directive to improve the quality "high standard field" projects--probably China's biggest agricultural program--issued this month. The directive promised to conduct surprise inspections, tests and evaluations to rectify shoddy, substandard projects that have been "causing public dissatisfaction." It took 5+ years and billions of dollars spent on 50,000 projects for Chinese authorities to admit there was a problem. You can bet that projects hidden away in China's mountains, deserts and grassland have an even higher degree of corruption, waste, and fakery.

China's past devastation of its farming areas going back decades is tacitly acknowledged in the 2025 Document No.1 which called for measures to address problems of gully erosion of the country's rich "black soil" region in the Northeast, acidified land in the South, schemes to farm salinized land, and a series of orders to crack down on encroachments on farmland by construction of houses, digging scenic lakes, and planting non-grain crops. The document called for tracing and controlling heavy metal contamination of farmland and pledged to clean up black and odiferous bodies of water in rural areas. Years ago, China retired wheat fields in part of Hebei Province due to serious depletion of underground aquifers used for irrigation, idled rice fields in Hunan due to cadmium poisoning of soil, banned farming in arsenic-laced land in mining areas, and curtailed subsidies for rice irrigated from shrinking aquifers in Heilongjiang Province. A 10-year ban on fishing in the Yangtze River is in effect because it had been severely over-fished. An agriculture ministry discussion of the fishing ban this month emphasized policing activity, a demonstration of the lack of actual control authorities have on the ground.

Chinese authorities think they can address the ecological devastation by putting secretive, subsidized state-run companies in charge of farming, but there are still few deterrents to ecological destruction and strong incentives to hide problems.