Juungar Banner, Inner Mongolia — The Yellow River Rice-Fish Eco-Tourism Park in Juungar Banner, Ordos, has transferred more than 20,000 jin, or roughly 10 metric tons, of seed crabs raised in-house from rearing ponds into dedicated overwintering ponds, according to an announcement distributed via Media OutReach Newswire. The stock will form the reserve from which next year's rice-field polyculture will draw, marking the third year the park has produced its own seed crabs and completing an integrated system that runs from megalopa rearing through field management to overwintering and stock retention.
The development matters because it demonstrates how degraded, saline-alkali land can be converted into a productive agricultural asset. Juungar Banner sits in the heart of the Yellow River's "Ji-shaped bend," with the river running 238 kilometers through the banner, or 28 percent of its course in Inner Mongolia. As a major source area of coarse sediment for the Yellow River, the banner long 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, where 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 from the soil, organic fertilizer was worked in, 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." This May the park brought in 200 jin of megalopae, the post-larval stage, 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 of seed crabs, 10,000 jin is earmarked for the park's own rice fields and the rest will be sold, bringing returns from both in-house grow-out and external sales. Overwintering care is critical to the survival of seed crabs; survival rates have held steady over the past two winters. Those that come through will go back into the paddies next May to be grown to adult size and reach the market in autumn.
The implications extend beyond one park. 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. In 2025, the village's collective income surpassed 500,000 yuan, and per-capita income reached 30,000 yuan. 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.
