High-tech farming cannot rescue China’s smallholders

China already feeds roughly 20% of the world’s population with less than 9% of global arable land and an even smaller share of freshwater resources. Amid geopolitical pressures, trade tensions and climate change, these structural constraints are tightening — particularly in soybeans, where import dependence exceeds 80%.

Beijing’s response is to extend its “new quality productive forces” agenda — innovation-driven productivity growth central to Xi Jinping’s economic vision and embedded in the 15th Five-Year Plan — into agriculture, reframing food security as a question of technological capability as much as production capacity.

It is in this context that, on 2 June, the State Council issued China’s agricultural and rural modernisation plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026–2030), with technology central to its food security strategy.

Whether that ambition translates into gains for China’s 230 million smallholder households, however, is a harder question.

A technology-led strategy

Building on earlier food security and rural revitalisation frameworks, the plan sets two binding targets. By 2030, China aims to raise comprehensive grain production capacity to around 725 million tonnes, up from 714.9 million tonnes in 2025, while increasing the pass rate of routine agricultural product quality and safety inspections to at least 98%.

Equally significant is the technological ambition. The plan sets an anticipatory target of raising the contribution rate of scientific and technological progress in agriculture to 67% by 2030, up from more than 64% in 2025, and calls for scaling up key industries including intelligent design breeding, new-energy agricultural machinery, the low-altitude agricultural economy, agricultural bio-manufacturing and new foods — with AI adoption across production and management explicitly prioritised alongside upgrades to processing systems. 

These measures signal a clear shift: from expanding inputs to driving gains through technology, industrial upgrading and digital integration.

Different provinces, different paths

The 2 June blueprint sets national targets but, at the time of writing, leaves geographic implementation largely open. Building on priorities established in the 2026 No. 1 Document, a complementary action programme issued jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA), the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in January 2026 provides more structure, proposing up to 500 agricultural modernisation demonstration zones by 2030 across six categories — grain industry, livestock and aquaculture, specialty industries, smart agriculture, urban agriculture and dryland agriculture. 

Three cases illustrate what that may mean in practice — and why outcomes are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

Heilongjiang is the natural anchor of the grain-industry category. As China’s largest grain-producing province, accounting for over 11% of national output, it combines abundant arable land with large-scale mechanised farming unmatched elsewhere. Its grain self-sufficiency ratio is projected to rise from around 595% in 2020 to more than 740% by 2030. The 2 June plan’s priorities — mechanisation, smart machinery, black-soil protection and irrigation upgrades — align directly with what Heilongjiang already does at scale, suggesting the province is well-positioned to absorb new investment faster and more effectively than most. 

This trajectory is reinforced by the 2022 Black Soil Protection Law and Heilongjiang’s 14th FYP Agricultural Science and Technology Development Plan, which targeted a science and technology contribution rate of 71% by 2025 — above the national 2030 benchmark — and had nearly reached it, at 70.8%, by 2024.

Zhejiang anchors the smart agriculture category. Designated as China’s sole national pioneer zone under the National Smart Agriculture Action Plan 2024–2028, it has become the country’s leading test bed for digital agricultural transformation. With around 67 million people and one of China’s highest per-capita GDP levels, the province is well-placed to translate the June 2 blueprint’s AI, digital factory and informatisation ambitions into practice — its own Smart Agriculture Leading Zone Implementation Plan 2025-2030 already targets 1,000 digital agricultural factories and 100 “future farms” by 2027, with agricultural informatisation rising to 55% by 2030 against a national target of 32% by 2028.

In contrast, Yunnan illustrates a different constraint. According to the Yunnan Provincial Territorial and Spatial Plan (2021–2035), mountains account for 94% of the province’s land area, with flat basin areas covering just 6% — leaving farmland that is inherently fragmented and difficult to mechanise at scale. Its comprehensive mechanisation rate stood 20 percentage points below the national average at the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan, and reached only 55% by its close, against a national average of 75.64% in 2024. 

Yunnan’s key agricultural strength lies in highland specialty products (such as coffee) its markets are predominantly across the border in Southeast Asia — pulling the province’s agricultural economy outward rather than toward the domestically focused supply chains the 2 June plan prioritises. Going forward, effective implementation will require the plan to accommodate structural and geographic diversity, not just set targets from the top down.

These cases suggest China’s agricultural modernisation is diverging into differentiated provincial pathways — and that the demonstration-zone framework, while creating space for multiple modernisation models, will not on its own correct the uneven distribution of capacity and resources that shapes who benefits most.

At the heart of that distribution problem lies a structural reality that no provincial framework alone can resolve: China remains a large nation of smallholder farmers (大国小农), with around 230 million farm households managing roughly 70% of cultivated land — meaning gains in productivity, mechanisation and digitalisation risk remaining uneven unless they reach this dispersed base.

Guizhou offers an early glimpse of what smallholder-compatible modernisation can look like. Unable to compete in grain production due to its mountainous and fragmented terrain, the province has built edible fungi into a major industry, generating around 27 billion RMB in output value in 2023. Much of this operates through a “company plus cooperative plus household plus base“ model, integrating smallholders into commercial supply chains without requiring land consolidation — broadly reflecting the inclusive, place-based logic of the plan’s “greater food approach”.

The June 2 plan, however, reflects a deeper tension. On the one hand, it calls for the “organic integration of smallholders and modern agricultural development” through family farms, cooperatives and agricultural service providers, echoing language codified in the 2019 Opinion, which implemented a commitment first made at the 19th Party Congress. On the other hand, it promotes moderate-scale operations, smart machinery and digital agriculture — dynamics that may, in practice, accelerate the exit of smaller and ageing farmers from production.

Building service networks for smallholder farmers a tall order

One proposed solution is service-based modernisation. As Peking University economist Justin Yifu Lin has argued, China need not consolidate land at scale — service-oriented organisations can bring modern technologies to smallholders while they retain their land. The plan broadly follows this logic, reinforced by MARA’s Action Plan on new-type agricultural operating entities and income-linkage mechanisms with smallholders.

Yet building service networks capable of delivering AI-enabled diagnostics across millions of fragmented plots is far more complex than working through already-capitalised operators. The persistence of near-identical policy language over seven years suggests a structural constraint, not a temporary implementation gap.

This ambiguity extends to the plan’s support mechanisms. The 2026 Central Finance Strong Agriculture Policy List funds wheat pest management, soybean-corn intercropping and northeast grain production, while explicitly encouraging large-scale growers — not smallholders — to take on demonstration roles. The 2026 No. 1 Document extended rural land contracts by another 30 years, with a March 2026 guideline subsequently expanding province-wide trials to 29 provincial-level regions. 

But distributional effects remain contested: evidence from rural China shows that subsidies are often captured by larger operators and local elites, and a January 2026 study finds that more targeted support for smallholders could raise welfare gains for the poorest households by around 50%. Whether implementation shifts toward that more inclusive allocation will be a key test of the plan’s effectiveness.

The implementation gap

Demographic and financial pressures compound these constraints. China’s agricultural workforce is ageing rapidly — the average farm worker was already 53 at the time of the Third National Agricultural Census, with more than a third aged 55 or above — and agricultural employment could fall to around 4% of the workforce by 2050. A 2025 study finds that 18.87% of family farms face funding gaps, further limiting smallholders’ capacity to adopt new technologies.

This raises a structural question: if the new agricultural plan’s technology targets are met disproportionately through one well-resourced coastal province, national averages may improve while masking the distance that inland and less-resourced provinces still need to travel. 

The digital divide sharpens this further: rural internet users accounted for just 27.7% of all users by mid-2024 despite rural residents making up roughly a third of the population — and research across 31 provinces shows that where broadband does expand, the productivity gains tend to flow to provinces that are already better connected, leaving the weakest regions further behind.

China’s agricultural modernisation will ultimately hinge on whether its benefits can reach a fragmented smallholder system and close deepening gaps in capacity, technology and income across regions. Without this, productivity gains are likely to remain uneven — reinforcing differentiated provincial pathways rather than delivering the unified transformation the plan envisions.

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