Amid the country's urge on all regions to develop all permanent cropland into high-standard cropland as a way to build up China's strength in agriculture, East China's Shandong province is bolstering the move to boost its grain output and speed up rural vitalization.

In Shandong's Juancheng county, a key grain producer, has strictly implemented the national development strategy of "storing grain in technology and storing grain in the land" in recent years, with the country regarding the construction of high-standard cropland as a crucial lever for rural vitalization.

As a farming area, Juancheng has a cultivation land of over 65,884.35 hectares, and a plantation land of more than 12,967.3 hectares.

Deng Zhaopeng, magistrate of Juancheng, has said that the county newly built 1,000 hectares of high-standard cropland last year.

In Juancheng's Zhengying town, Han Kequ, secretary of the Party branch of Hantun village, said: "The government has helped us repair water conservancy and improve field supporting facilities. Now farming is easier and our agriculture output value has expanded, and the enthusiasm of the villagers to grow grain has also grown."

Back in 2024, Zhengying town upgraded high-standard cropland in 10 administrative villages, renovating or newly building 24,129 meters of irrigation channels, and adding 136 irrigation wells, 82.42 kilometers of irrigation pipelines, and 18 culverts.

Upon completion of the projects, the infrastructure and irrigation capacity of the town's farmland was effectively improved, helping to bolster the average grain yield per mu (0.06 hectare) of high-standard cropland by 10 percent to 20 percent, while slashing the average cost per mu by some 500 yuan ($70.4).

Han noted that the irrigation water utilization rate will also be raised from 30 percent before the upgrading to 80 percent, making to make "grain fields" into "high-yielding fields".

He stressed that the new transformation in Zhengying town is a microcosm of the high-standard cropland construction model of "dredged ditches, water-saving irrigation and connected roads, making crop fields into a scenery".

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