At the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, superior seeds and farming techniques have turned vast stretches of sand dunes into a fertile grain producing land. Deep in the canyons of the Tianshan Mountains, smart aquaculture has transformed the frigid river waters into productive cold water fish farms. On the Gobi wastelands, intelligent greenhouses have made the once barren landscape yield fresh vegetables and fruits all year round.
Xinjiang, far from the ocean, possesses a unique natural geography and is a typical arid and semi arid region. Today, this land, accounting for one sixth of China's territory, is using technological innovation as an engine to write a new chapter in specialty agriculture.
Extracting production capacity from saline alkali land
During the spring plowing season, the thousand mu desert rice planting base in Chang'an Town, Alar City, is bustling with activity. Two years ago, this was an endless expanse of barren sand. "Last year, the rice yield per mu on this sandy land exceeded 600 kilograms," said Feng Wei, general manager of Alar Hehe Rice Industry Company Limited.
Behind this abundant harvest lies a powerful combination of superior seeds and advanced cultivation techniques. Salt tolerant rice varieties, together with dry direct seeding technology, ensure a full stand of seedlings with just one sowing. A water saving approach that involves soaking the seeds first, followed by staged irrigation, along with the use of plastic film mulching on ridges, has successfully solved the core challenges of growing rice in the desert.
What adds even greater industrial value is that the ecological benefits brought by this technology are now transforming into future production capacity. Chen Xiandong, a local agricultural research official, explained that rice cultivation helps flush out salt from the soil. After several consecutive years of planting, soil salinity and alkalinity decrease significantly, opening up growing space for subsequent cash crops such as cotton and corn.
This rice based approach to alkalinity control not only secures grain production in the current year but also lays the foundation for sustainable land use over the long term.
Xinjiang has the most extensive distribution of saline alkali land in China. Its existing farmland exceeds 100 million mu (1 mu is about 0.067 hectares), of which 34.28 million mu are saline alkali soils in key regions. For a long time, managing saline alkali land has been a central challenge for the high quality development of agriculture in Xinjiang.
Xu Wanli, director of the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Environment at the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, introduced that in recent years, Xinjiang has developed a series of innovative technological solutions. These include dry sowing with wet emergence, drip irrigation for salt displacement, engineered salt drainage, land adaptation to crops, and crop adaptation to land. Thanks to these technologies, both the effectiveness of saline alkali land management and farmland productivity have seen significant improvements.
Currently, four typical demonstration core areas, each covering a thousand mu for the comprehensive utilization of moderate to severe saline alkali land, have been established in northern and southern Xinjiang.
In the Guhai District of large scale agriculture in Karamay, a model has been developed to improve production capacity, quality, and efficiency through salt control, fertility enhancement, and carbon sequestration. A year round salt control technology system centered on dry sowing with wet emergence has been formed. As a result, the seedling survival rate on saline alkali land has increased by 30 percent, and crop yield has risen by over 15 percent.
In Kashi Prefecture, an integrated control technology model focused on dry sowing with wet emergence, water fertilizer salt regulation, and bio organic fertilization has been adopted. This has significantly reduced soil salt content in the demonstration area and increased crop yield by more than 10 percent.
In Bohu County, Bayingolin Mongolian Autonomous Prefecture, comprehensive improvement technologies including subsurface pipe drainage for salt removal, multi dimensional barrier breaking, and coordinated irrigation and drainage have been applied to create a demonstration model for efficient saline alkali land management. In this demonstration base, crop yield has increased by 22.41 percent, and irrigation water use efficiency has reached over 65 percent.
In January of this year, a report on the comprehensive utilization technologies for saline alkali land in Xinjiang was officially released, providing systematic technical support for the precise management of such lands in the region.
Xu explained that in response to the long improvement cycles, high costs, and recurring challenges associated with severe saline alkali land, researchers have proposed a new approach shifting from soil improvement to feature oriented utilization. This approach takes the development of specialty agriculture on saline alkali land as its core pathway, aiming to reduce development costs while achieving efficient use of saline alkali land resources.
This strategic shift has brought about new industrial opportunities. Salt tolerant rapeseed, goji berries, forage grasses, and other specialty crops are now taking root on saline alkali land. The land is thus transforming from a burden on agricultural production into a valuable resource for specialty industries.
Extracting value from cold water resources
Turpan, known as the "Land of Fire," often sees summer surface temperatures exceed 70 degrees Celsius. Yet beneath the ground lies an abundance of cold spring resources.
At a local cold water fish farming base, gravity fed Tianshan snowmelt water is channeled into 52 standardized aquaculture ponds. These ponds maintain a constant water temperature of 10 to 18 degrees Celsius throughout the year. The base employs a land based multi stage flow through aquaculture technology, using independent water purification units to ensure stable and controllable water quality. The treated tail water meets environmental standards before being delivered to agricultural land, achieving a dual use of water for both aquaculture and irrigation. As a result, water resource utilization efficiency has increased by over 30 percent.
Although Xinjiang is far from the ocean, it has over 46 million mu of water area suitable for aquaculture. In particular, the cold water resources formed by high mountain snow and ice melt are of excellent quality and rich in dissolved oxygen, making them highly suitable for cold water fish. In recent years, leveraging this unique resource, Xinjiang has initially built a diversified industrial system with bulk freshwater fish as the mainstay and cold water fish as a specialty.
At the Wenquan Reservoir in Nilka County, Ili Kazak Autonomous Prefecture, deep in the Tianshan Mountains, approximately 40 intelligent, environmentally friendly net pens are arranged in a line across 15,000 mu of water area. Automated feeding systems deliver precise amounts of feed, underwater intelligent cleaning robots shuttle through the water, and the entire breeding process is managed digitally.
Li Chunyu, general manager of Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture Co., Ltd., said, "After 12 years of development, the company has built three major breeding and processing bases and four processing plants. Its farming water area exceeds 140,000 mu, with an annual production capacity of 12,000 tons."
Nilka County is located deep in the Tianshan Mountains, upstream of the Kashi River. It possesses abundant glacial snowmelt resources, with water temperatures remaining between 8 and 13 degrees Celsius throughout the year, providing an ideal natural environment for cold water fish. This unique geographical and ecological advantage attracted the company to establish itself there, and continuous investment in technological innovation has supported its growth and expansion.
Traveling by boat, workers were seen lightly pressing a button. The fish pump started, and fish were gently suctioned from the net pens through a closed pipeline. Li explained, "This is our independently developed, domestically produced large diameter intelligent fish pump, which avoids mechanical injury to the fish." He noted that traditional harvesting methods easily cause abrasions to the fish body, affecting both quality and survival rates. The equipment was put into use in 2024 and will achieve mass production this year, with an expected reduction of over 60 percent in labor costs during the harvesting stage.
The fish pump is just one part of the company's annual research and development investment. Li stated that the company allocates 4 percent of its annual sales revenue to the iterative upgrade of its intelligent aquaculture system. To date, it has established eight intelligent systems, including water quality online monitoring, automatic feeding, underwater cleaning, and fish school behavior recognition, achieving full process digital management.
In recent years, Xinjiang has actively promoted and applied ecological recirculating aquaculture technologies. A variety of farming models have been developed, including eco-friendly net pen fish farming, dual use Gobi water saving aquaculture that uses water for both fish farming and irrigation, recirculating aquaculture, saline alkali water aquaculture, and integrated rice fish farming. As a result, the space for aquaculture has been significantly expanded.
At the same time, the industrial chain is continuously extending. Deep processing products such as fish collagen protein are under development, and related industries including fry breeding, fishery machinery manufacturing, feed processing, and packaging material manufacturing are also flourishing.
In water rich areas such as Sayram Lake and Ulungur Lake, immersive consumer scenarios have been created that combine competitive angling with fishing cultural experiences. In 2025, the output value of Xinjiang's fishing industry grew by 24.3 percent.
Creating space from the Gobi desert
Wind blows, stones tumble, and no grass grows. This has long been the impression left by the Gobi on the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert. However, in Keping County, Aksu Prefecture, a green Gobi facility agriculture industrial park covering 10,000 mu has changed that perception. More than 230 new type solar greenhouses stretch out like silver ribbons, with lush fruits and vegetables inside the greenhouses and fish, shrimp, and crabs thriving in the ponds.
Growing vegetables on the Gobi faces the initial hurdles of having no arable soil and limited water. The park has innovatively adopted a soilless cultivation model using sand as the medium, preparing customized nutrient solutions for the crops and delivering them precisely to the roots through targeted drip irrigation.
To improve land use efficiency and reduce costs, the park has innovatively built a dual section greenhouse with both sunlit and shaded sides. The sunlit side, which receives ample light, is used to grow premium fruits and vegetables such as oranges, papayas, and tomatoes. The shaded side, where light is limited, is used to cultivate light intolerant crops such as mushrooms, blanched garlic chives, blanched yellow garlic sprouts, and sprout vegetables.
Each greenhouse is embedded with Internet of Things sensors. Data on temperature, humidity, light, soil moisture, and more are transmitted in real time to the control center. Staff can precisely regulate conditions by simply tapping an app on their phones, achieving one person managing a hundred greenhouses. The products from the park are sold both online and offline, with daily orders reaching 3,000 to 5,000.
In recent years, Xinjiang has transformed its deserts and Gobi into vegetable production bases through technological empowerment. Gobi facility agriculture bases and parks have sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain. The large scale layout of over one million greenhouses, the innovative use of Gobi desert resources, and the industrialized development of high value added crops are providing vast space for modern agricultural development.
On the southern edge of the Junggar Basin, within the Xinjiang Agricultural Expo Park at the Changji National High Tech Agricultural Zone, a Smart Agriculture Science and Technology Museum is redefining the modern agricultural landscape.
Entering the Smart Agriculture Science and Technology Museum, rows of leafy vegetables are seen stretching out on three dimensional cultivation racks. The facility uses ebb and flow irrigation and vertical cultivation techniques. Vegetable roots are periodically soaked in nutrient solution, while an intelligent environmental control system precisely regulates temperature, humidity, light, and other factors, enabling year round uninterrupted production.
Even more astonishing is its production efficiency. Using vertical cultivation, the growth cycle of leafy vegetables is shortened from 70 days in traditional farming to just 18 to 25 days. This allows for more than 10 harvests per year, with a yield over 10 times that of traditional cultivation methods.
Yan Ji, operations director of China Agricultural Jinwang (Beijing) Agricultural Engineering Technology Co.,Ltd., the company operating the Smart Agriculture Science and Technology Museum, said, "We have integrated and applied over 50 patented technologies to achieve intelligent management and green recycling in vegetable production." The museum relies on modern agricultural technologies such as the 5G Internet of Things and bionic spiral cultivation to achieve intelligent and precise management throughout the entire planting process.
In 2025, the museum sold 150 tons of leafy vegetables and 580 tons of fruit vegetables. This plant factory has also innovatively launched an agriculture plus cultural tourism development model, featuring specialized projects such as agricultural technology displays and pipeline cultivation courses. It has received a total of 560,000 visitors and conducted over 60 study tour activities.
(Source: Economic Daily, Reporter: Geng Dandan)
