Juungar Banner: Building a "Reserve of Seed Crabs" on Saline-Alkali Flats
- Written by: Telegraph Magazine
Freshly harvested seed crabs are being transferred to the overwintering ponds.
In early winter, workers at the park are making the most of the season, hauling up the rearing cages and releasing the lively young crabs into purpose-built overwintering ponds. The 20,000-plus jin of quality seed crabs bred at the park are now in the critical stage of concentrated harvest and transfer, and the stock will carry the rice fields through next year's growing season.
Juungar Banner sits in the heart of the Yellow River's "Ji-shaped bend." The river runs 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 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 has 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." Traditional corn fields there yielded less than 300 jin per mu, or roughly 2.25 metric tons per hectare. A fragile ecology and poor livelihoods were the twin shackles on this stretch of riverbank.
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 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."
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, hands-on 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 has come together from megalopa rearing and field management to overwintering and stock retention.
Lively seed crabs settle into the overwintering ponds, where they will spend the cold months as prime stock for next year's rice-field crab farming.
"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.
From bare saline-alkali waste to "three harvests from one field," Xiaotanzi's turnaround 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.
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
