Workers at the Yellow River Rice-Fish Eco-Tourism Park in Juungar Banner, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, have lifted more than 20,000 jin, or roughly 10 metric tons, of seed crabs from their rearing ponds and transferred them into dedicated overwintering ponds, according to an announcement carried by Media OutReach Newswire. The stock will supply the park's rice fields when next year's polyculture cycle begins, building what the park describes as a reserve of seed crabs for the coming season.
The scale of the transfer matters because it marks the third consecutive year the park has raised its own seed crabs. In May the park brought in 200 jin of megalopae, the post-larval stage, from Panjin in Liaoning province and released them into the rice paddies to grow out. After a full growing cycle, the operation produced more than 20,000 jin of quality seed crabs. According to Qiao Sheng, who heads agricultural production at the park, raising the seed crabs in-house lowers the cost of stock, gives the operation a much better handle on quality, and has improved survival rates, making the rice-crab business steadier and easier to plan. Of this year's harvest, 10,000 jin is earmarked for the park's own fields and the remainder will be sold, generating returns from both in-house grow-out and external sales.
Overwintering care is critical to the survival of seed crabs, and survival rates have held steady over the past two winters, according to the announcement. Those that come through will return to the paddies next May, be grown to adult size, and reach the market in autumn.
The significance of the operation lies in the land it occupies. Juungar Banner sits in the heart of the Yellow River's "Ji-shaped bend," with the river running 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. Traditional corn fields there yielded less than 300 jin per mu, or roughly 2.25 metric tons per hectare, and residents described a landscape that was "a stretch of white," where nine crops in ten failed.
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 what the announcement describes as "three harvests from a single field."
The economic impact is already visible. In 2025, Xiaotanzi Village's collective income surpassed 500,000 yuan, and per-capita income reached 30,000 yuan. The park's crab reserve is one facet of Juungar Banner's broader shift from ecological governance to industrial transformation, a transition from "black-grey" to "green" unfolding across the Yellow River's Ji-shaped bend.
