Dryland Farming Innovation in the Loess Plateau of China: Opportunities and Challenges.

The Loess Plateau is one of the birthplaces of the Chinese culture. The population keeps increasing, and climate tends to be warming and drying in the recent 60 years. In order to solve the problem of food shortages and impoverishment, the local people continued to reclaim the land to grow crops and increase grazing intensity in the natural grassland. But in severe drought year, people have to go out and beg for a living. Excess reclamation and graze caused by the low agricultural productivity leads to more severe soil erosion and land degradation. Severe poverty and ecological degradation have been plaguing the local people. Since the founding of new China in 1949, the governments together with scientists and local people have endeavored to explore how to develop farming production and restore ecological in the region. In recent years, the ecosystem restoration and reconstruction in Loess Plateau has made significant progress, through the ridge-furrow and film mulching technology, maize yield increased by 138% in the area with an annual precipitation of 300mm area, and 33% in the area with an average annual precipitation of 550 mm area. In the area or year with deficient water and low temperature, yield increase potential is higher than that with better water and temperature conditions. Similar results were observed with potatoes. Crop production system is concentrating to maize and potatoes with the increasing market demand. Meanwhile, the planting areas of other traditional crops with short growth period and low yield are gradually reduced. The natural adjustment of planting structure is promoting the continuous increase of crop production capacity in this region. After entering twenty-first Century, the degraded ecosystem is being shifted from deterioration to restoration with increasing vegetation coverage due to the productivity increasing in the dryland farming and the pressure decreasing on the ecosystem, which is developing toward a sustainable direction. And more works need to promote the harmony development of ecological restoration and dryland agriculture in the semiarid Loess Plateau.