The Yellow River Rice-Fish Eco-Tourism Park in Juungar Banner, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, has moved more than 20,000 jin, roughly 10 metric tons, of seed crabs raised in-house from rearing ponds into dedicated overwintering ponds, according to Media OutReach Newswire. The transfer builds the reserve that next year's rice-field polyculture will draw from, and it matters because it marks the third consecutive year the park has closed the loop from megalopa rearing to overwintering and stock retention, rather than depending on outside suppliers each spring.
Workers are hauling up rearing cages and releasing the young crabs into purpose-built ponds as early winter sets in. The stock is in the critical stage of concentrated harvest and transfer, and its survival through the cold months will determine how much the rice fields can be stocked next May, when the crabs return to the paddies to grow to adult size for the autumn market.
The significance of the operation is rooted in the land itself. 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 left some 80 percent of the land chronically saline-alkali. "For as far as the eye could see, the land was a stretch of white, and nine crops in ten failed," the announcement notes, with traditional corn fields yielding less than 300 jin per mu, or roughly 2.25 metric tons per hectare. A fragile ecology and poor livelihoods were the twin shackles on this stretch of riverbank.
In 2018, Dalu Town introduced a combined approach of saline-alkali land improvement and integrated rice-fish farming, digging ditches to flush salts, working organic fertilizer into the soil and planting salt-tolerant rice on a trial basis. In 2022, the park began large-scale operations with an integrated polyculture of rice, crab and fish, in which the rice shaded the aquatic animals and their waste fertilized the fields, yielding "three harvests from a single field."
This May the park brought in 200 jin of megalopae from Panjin, Liaoning, and released them into the rice paddies. After a full growing cycle under close management, it produced more than 20,000 jin of quality seed crabs. Qiao Sheng, who heads agricultural production at the park, said buying in megalopae to raise seed crabs lowers the cost of stock, gives the park 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 stock, 10,000 jin is earmarked for the park's own fields and the rest will be sold.
The implications extend beyond one harvest. Survival rates have held steady over the past two winters, and in 2025 the village's collective income surpassed 500,000 yuan, with per-capita income reaching 30,000 yuan. Xiaotanzi's turnaround from bare saline-alkali waste to three harvests from one field is one facet of Juungar Banner's broader shift from ecological governance to industrial transformation, a transition from "black-grey" to "green" that the overwintering ponds now quietly underwrite.
