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. The transfer, reported via Media OutReach Newswire, builds a reserve that next year's rice-field polyculture will draw from, and it signals that a region once defined by saline-alkali wasteland is turning ecological repair into a durable industry.
The significance lies in what the seed crabs represent: self-sufficiency in stock. This May the park brought in 200 jin of megalopae from Panjin, Liaoning, and released them into rice paddies. After a full growing cycle under close management, the park produced more than 20,000 jin of quality seed crabs. It is the third year the park has raised its own seed crabs, and the integrated system now spans megalopa rearing, field management, overwintering and stock retention. "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 stock, 10,000 jin is earmarked for the park's own fields and the rest will be sold, generating returns from both in-house grow-out and external sales.
Overwintering is critical to survival, and rates have held steady over the past two winters. The crabs that come through will return to the paddies next May to grow to adult size and reach the market in autumn. That reliability matters because the park sits in the heart of the Yellow River's "Ji-shaped bend," where the river runs 238 kilometers through the banner—28 percent of its course in Inner Mongolia. Long a major source of coarse sediment, the area suffered severe 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. "For as far as the eye could see, the land was a stretch of white, and nine crops in ten failed," the announcement noted. Traditional corn fields yielded less than 300 jin per mu, or roughly 2.25 metric tons per hectare. In 2018, Dalu Town introduced a combined approach of saline-alkali land improvement and integrated rice-fish farming: ditches were dug to flush salts, organic fertilizer was worked into the soil, and salt-tolerant rice was planted on a trial basis. In 2022, the park began large-scale operations 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." The model's implications extend beyond one park: in 2025, the village's collective income surpassed 500,000 yuan, and per-capita income reached 30,000 yuan.
Xiaotanzi's turnaround from bare saline-alkali waste to "three harvests from one field" is one facet of Juungar Banner's broader shift from ecological governance to industrial transformation. Across the winter fields of the Yellow River's Ji-shaped bend, 20,000 jin of seed crabs lie quiet in their overwintering ponds, waiting for May and their return to the rice fields, while a deeper transformation, from "black-grey" to "green," keeps unfolding across this land.
