Xinhua, Beijing, August 25 - On August 24, Xinhua Daily Telegraph published a report titled "From 'Scale Leader' to 'Quality Highland': Inner Mongolia Builds a National Base for Important Agricultural and Livestock Products with High Quality."
Vast grasslands brimming with life, rolling wheat fields across the plain, modern pastures teeming with cattle and sheep - this flourishing picture of farming and animal husbandry is a vivid footnote to Inner Mongolia's role as the nation's "granary," "meat storehouse" and "milk can."
Building a national base for important agricultural and livestock products is a strategic positioning entrusted to Inner Mongolia by the central authorities, and a weighty responsibility. In recent years, Inner Mongolia has forged its strengths and shored up its weaknesses, boosting production and efficiency with technology, adding value through processing and conversion, and enriching and empowering farmers and herders through linkage mechanisms - steadily moving from "leading in scale" toward a "quality highland," and blazing a high-quality development path for a traditional agricultural and pastoral giant leaping toward modern strength.
A Fuller "Granary," a Richer "Meat Storehouse," a Fuller "Milk Can"
Stable production and guaranteed supply are the top tasks in building the base. In recent years, Inner Mongolia has kept pushing on the three core categories of grain, meat and milk, supported by high-standard farmland construction, driven by technological innovation and oriented toward modern efficiency, continuously strengthening its capacity to supply agricultural and livestock products.
Good farmland is the foundation of stable grain output. In the cornfields of Horqin Left Wing Middle Banner in Tongliao, dense rows of plants stand tall and neat. "This sandy wasteland used to leak water and fertilizer; now yields per mu steadily exceed one ton," said Lin Rong, head of the Tongliao Bofeng Agricultural Machinery and Farming Cooperative.
The change comes from the deep integration of high-standard farmland with complete technology packages. By the end of 2025, Inner Mongolia had cumulatively built 62.81 million mu of high-standard farmland, covering 47% of its permanent basic farmland and supporting more than two-thirds of the region's grain production capacity.
Data from the Inner Mongolia Department of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry show that in 2025 the region's grain output reached 84.07 billion jin (about 42 million tonnes), up 2.06 billion jin from the previous year, lifting its national ranking from sixth to fifth for the first time - the "granary beyond the Great Wall" now rests on a firmer, richer foundation.
Inner Mongolia's breeding R&D capacity for characteristic crops such as millet, sunflower and soybean now ranks in the national first tier, with potato seed propagation area first in the country and soybean seed area second. Building on seed-industry strengths, the region has built national-level platforms such as the dairy innovation center, the forage innovation center and the Bayannur agricultural high-tech zone, along with 17 provincial- and ministerial-level key laboratories, using seed innovation to drive technological empowerment across the whole agricultural chain.
With quality raw materials from good seeds, localities have extended their processing chains and mined product value. In Tongliao, Inner Mongolia Kerqin Cattle Industry Co. subdivides a single animal into more than 70 product categories carrying traceability QR codes, selling well in first-tier city markets; a Chifeng enterprise, relying on local quality millet, independently developed a low-temperature light-milling process to open up a germ-millet niche; and Ulanqab, drawing on quality potato varieties, has built the country's largest french-fry and hash-brown processing base.
Zhao Yusheng, deputy director of the regional agriculture and animal husbandry department, said the dairy, corn and mutton-sheep industrial chains each exceed 100 billion yuan in output value, the beef-cattle and forage chains each top 50 billion yuan, and nine chains including cashmere, potato, soybean and sunflower have passed the 10-billion-yuan mark, forming a gradient, multi-pillar industrial pattern.
"Inner Mongolia has built 12 national advantageous characteristic industrial clusters, 15 national modern agricultural industrial parks and 76 agricultural industrial towns, with planting, processing, leisure agriculture and rural logistics linked in multiple forms - the industrial backbone of integrated primary, secondary and tertiary development is growing steadily stronger," Zhao said.
Innovations in production and marketing are carrying quality farm and livestock products across the country. Inner Mongolia has created a dual-track promotion model of "official platforms plus agricultural promotion ambassadors," training more than 3,000 professional agricultural promotion officers, building 23 standardized exhibition and sales centers, and laying out three centralized warehouses inside the region plus three forward distribution warehouses outside it, creating a modern marketing system linking online and offline, inside and outside the region, to push Inner Mongolia's quality products beyond the grasslands.
In 2025, the total output value of Inner Mongolia's farming, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery exceeded 500 billion yuan, up 5.1%. Department director Guo Zhanjiang said the region will coordinate seed innovation, capacity enhancement, industry upgrading and brand cultivation, striving to build an agricultural and pastoral powerhouse with higher quality across the whole chain and better serve the construction of the national base.
Blazing Diverse Paths to Enrich People and Revitalize Villages
The core purpose of building the base lies in enriching people and revitalizing villages. Over the years, Inner Mongolia has explored new paths, solved hard problems and cultivated new models to raise farmer and herder incomes by every possible means, using industrial revitalization to drive rural revitalization - laying foundations for its own high-quality development while contributing wisdom to the modernization of farming and pastoral areas nationwide.
In midsummer Tongliao, corn plants in the high-standard fields of Wenjia Village, Qianjiadian Town, Kerqin District, stand sturdy and flourishing. These high-standard fields were built entirely by the village's own residents. "I worked two months and earned nearly 20,000 yuan," villager Wang Jingyang said with a smile. "It didn't delay my farming, and I learned to operate farm machinery too."
Such stories are not isolated cases. Inner Mongolia has vigorously promoted work-relief programs in rural and pastoral areas, stipulating that 10% of the winning bid amounts for "Three-North" shelterbelt and high-standard farmland projects go to labor remuneration. In Tongliao alone, 15,800 farmers and herders took part in high-standard farmland construction in 2025, raising per-capita income by more than 15,000 yuan on average.
Paths to higher income are not singular. Every morning at 9, herder Wang Xiangqun of Ar Horqin Banner in Chifeng reports to work at the Aoya Ranch as human-resources manager, earning 10,000 yuan a month. The ranch employs more than 600 farmers and herders and buys forage from over 500 surrounding herder households, with its milk supplied steadily to Mengniu. Statistics show that Yili and Mengniu alone - both Inner Mongolia companies - link nearly 10 million farmers and herders across the country.
Inner Mongolia takes sound industry-linkage mechanisms as the key lever for enriching people. Zhao Yusheng said the region has replicated characteristic development models such as "unified planting for shared prosperity," "forage-livestock linkage" and "raising-plus-processing integration," building deep interest-linkage systems between industrial development and farmer incomes. Department data show per-capita disposable income of farmers and herders reached 23,855 yuan in 2025, up 5.8% year on year.
In Dalad Banner of Ordos, party-building-led innovation has promoted the "unified planting for shared prosperity" model. "Villages set up cooperatives to centralize land transfer, mechanized planting and enterprise-style operation, with profits returned according to land investment - both villagers' and collective incomes have stepped up to a new level," said banner party secretary Wang Xiaoping. The land is the same land, but a different way of organizing it grows a different kind of hope; the model has now spread within Inner Mongolia and to many places beyond.
Technological empowerment is an enduring driving force for enriching people, and it delivers value to high-quality development nationwide. The Ulanqab cool-season vegetable academician workstation keeps breaking new ground in seed breeding, and quality domestic seeds for carrots, cabbage and more have spread from there to fields across the country. "With the domestic 'Zhonggan 628' seed, farmers' cabbage seed cost per mu fell from 700-800 yuan to 75 yuan, with per-mu income of at least 3,000 yuan," said Guan Huiming, the workstation's head and a national science-and-technology commissioner. "From the northern frontier to the south of the Yangtze, quality domestic seeds keep helping farmers achieve stable yields and rising incomes."
Guo Zhanjiang said that next, Inner Mongolia will focus on implementing ten major projects - seed chips, innovation-chain building, grain-capacity enhancement, beef and mutton production gains and more - to accelerate agricultural and pastoral modernization and build a genuine powerhouse. "The region will keep its focus on matters of national importance, building the national base for important agricultural and livestock products with higher standards and fuller confidence, and resolutely safeguarding national food security," he said.
