Juungar Banner in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, has moved more than 20,000 jin—roughly 10 metric tons—of seed crabs raised in-house at the Yellow River Rice-Fish Eco-Tourism Park from rearing ponds into dedicated overwintering ponds, creating a reserve that next year's rice-field polyculture will draw from. The transfer, reported via Media OutReach Newswire, marks the third consecutive year the park has produced its own seed crabs and signals that an integrated rice-crab-fish system on severely saline-alkali land has matured into a repeatable operating cycle.
The significance lies in what the reserve represents for agricultural resilience in a region long defined by ecological failure. Juungar Banner sits in the heart of the Yellow River's "Ji-shaped bend," with the river running 238 kilometers through the banner—28 percent of its course in Inner Mongolia. As a major source area of coarse sediment for the Yellow River, the banner suffered severe soil erosion, with eroded land at one point covering more than 70 percent of its total area. Around Xiaotanzi Village in Dalu Town, geology left some 80 percent of the land chronically saline-alkali. Traditional corn fields yielded less than 300 jin per mu, or roughly 2.25 metric tons per hectare, and residents described the landscape as "a stretch of white" where "nine crops in ten failed."
The turnaround began in 2018, when Dalu Town introduced a combined approach of saline-alkali land improvement and integrated rice-fish farming. Ditches were dug to flush salts from the soil, organic fertilizer was worked in, and salt-tolerant rice was planted on a trial basis. In 2022, the park scaled up with an integrated polyculture of rice, crab and fish: the rice shaded the aquatic animals, and their waste fertilized the fields, yielding "three harvests from a single field." This May, the park brought in 200 jin of megalopae from Panjin, Liaoning, and released them into the rice paddies to grow out. After a full growing cycle under close management, the park produced more than 20,000 jin of quality seed crabs.
"Buying in megalopae to raise the seed crabs ourselves lowers the cost of stock, gives us a much better handle on quality, and has improved survival rates. It makes the rice-crab business steadier and easier to plan," said Qiao Sheng, who heads agricultural production at the park. Of this year's 20,000-plus jin, 10,000 jin is earmarked for the park's own rice fields and the rest will be sold, generating returns from both in-house grow-out and external sales.
Overwintering care is critical to seed crab survival, and rates have held steady over the past two winters. Those that come through will return to the paddies next May to be grown to adult size and reach the market in autumn. The implications extend beyond one park: Xiaotanzi's shift from bare saline-alkali waste to "three harvests from one field" is one facet of Juungar Banner's broader transition from ecological governance to industrial transformation. In 2025, the village's collective income surpassed 500,000 yuan, and per-capita income reached 30,000 yuan. As 20,000 jin of seed crabs lie quiet in their overwintering ponds waiting for May, the reserve demonstrates how degraded land can be converted into a productive, income-generating asset—and offers a model for other saline-alkali regions along the Yellow River.
