Same soybean policy, different responses of agricultural systems: Comparing effectiveness of cropping pattern adjusting in state farms and rural household farms of Heilongjiang, China

Abstract

State farms, although a minority in China’s agricultural sector, play a critical role in regions like Heilongjiang, leading national food production. However, how state farms (SFs) and rural household farms (RFs) respond to food policies, especially the 2017 soybean subsidy policy (post-Sino–U.S. trade war) and the 2019 soybean revitalization policy, remains unclear. This study examines changes in cropping patterns on SFs and RFs in Heilongjiang from 2013 to 2022 using annual crop maps. We find that SFs, with larger and more clustered fields, responded more effectively to the soybean policies: soybean acreage recovery (2019–2021) reached 91.51 % of pre-trade war levels for RFs and 98.2 % for SFs; following the revitalization policy, maize-soybean rotations were implemented four times in 62.3 % of SFs and 45.4 % of RFs. These results highlight the influence of global trade and agricultural policies on cropland management, providing critical insights into sustainable practices and food security across different agricultural systems.

Keywords

Agricultural systems / Cropping pattern / Heilongjiang province / Soybean revitalization policy / Sino–US trade war

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xi Chen: Writing – original draft, Resources, Software, Project administration, Formal analysis. Jinwei Dong: Methodology, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Zhichao Li: Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Li Sun: Validation, Investigation. Chuantao Ren: Investigation, Validation, Funding acquisition. Guoming Du: Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization, Methodology. Yuanyuan Di: Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Nanshan You: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Xiaoyong Liao: Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFD1500200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 72221002, 42271375, 42461144212), the Informatization Plan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. CAS-WX2021PY-0109), the funding project of Northeast Geological S&T Innovation Center Zone of China Geological Survey (Grant No. QCJJ2022-9), and the funding project of China Association for Science and Technology (Grant No. XMSB20240927024).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100330.

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