Implications of agricultural success in the Yellow River Basin and its strategy for green development

Highlights

● Ecological fragility and water shortage are key challenges in the Yellow River Basin.

● Efficient water use technology in drylands greatly increases crop production.

● Water-saving irrigation has been widely adopted and has greatly improved water use.

● Changing water use from unregulated and inefficient to intensive and efficient is key solution.

● Watershed-scale coordination is a key step towards agriculture green development.

Abstract

The Yellow River Basin is an important food production area and an ecological challenge for China, where environmental protection and water scarcity are the major constraints. For the upper reaches of the Yellow River Basin, optimizing the adoption of chemicals in agricultural production and integrating crops with livestock are the key strategies for protecting the eco-environment. For dryland agriculture in the middle and upper reaches, this study summarizes four aspects of efficient precipitation techniques in terms of collection, storage, conservation, and use, which have greatly improved crop yields and supported dryland crop production. Irrigated agriculture in the middle and lower reaches is the core area of China’s grain production, where the area under water-saving irrigation reached 13.0 Mha in 2018, greatly improving water use. Compared with 1998, cereal production in 2018 increased by 62.2 Mt under similar total water withdrawals (49.7 billion to 51.6 billion m³), and the annual soil erosion at the Tongguan Hydrological Observatory reduced by 584 million m³ in 2018, achieving great success in environmental protection and efficient water use. The Chinese government has set a goal for the Yellow River Basin to become the national leader in environmental protection and efficient water use by 2035. Such a high demand requires the combined efforts of the whole community, as well as the adoption of new technologies, coordinated basin-wide development, and adequate policy support.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Ecological agriculture / drylands agriculture / irrigation / water-saving technology / policy support

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFD1900700) and the China Agricultural Research System (CARS-3-1-31).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Gang He, Zhaohui Wang, Qichao Zhu, Jianbo Shen, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2024. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)