Faced with a growing food security crisis, China is reforming its agriculture industry in what could be the biggest change since the Great Leap Forward

The character that adorns Liu Chengbao’s gateposts means “good luck.” Not that he’s seen much of that recently. Rising at 6 a.m. each day, Liu leaves his wife and father in his self-built, four-room house and trudges toward the terraced foothills of northern China’s Six Ring Mountains. The 51-year-old ekes out a living by growing corn and potatoes on his 0.65 hectares of land in Gansu — a dumbbell-shaped province roughly the size of California and famed for its kaleidoscope-colored mountains of blue, yellow and crimson ribbons. Only 300 people remain in Wang Meng village, where Liu lives, and no one is particularly sprightly — young people leave ever earlier these days. “I’m too old to get a job the city,” says Liu, “I don’t have the strength.”

Each year, Liu takes home around $1,500, which just about pays for his two children’s higher education in Lanzhou, Gansu’s sprawling capital. He has no savings. Other than his crops, he raises two cows and tends a small patch of vegetables. “We only eat meat at Spring Festival [Chinese New Year],” he says. When he’s not farming, Liu earns $15 a day as a local construction worker, carrying sticks or mixing concrete. Like all his neighbors, he uses pesticides and fertilizer on his fields. “It makes the yield better,” Liu says, “but I use less on the vegetables that we eat ourselves.”

China’s food security relies on farmers like Liu — and it’s increasingly unsustainable. The nation of 1.3 billion accounts for almost a fifth of the world’s population, yet boasts just 7% of arable land. Moderate to severe soil degradation affects more than 40% of the country, exacerbated by overuse of fertilizer, intensive grazing and the reliance on biomass for rural energy. While China’s belching factories hog the headlines, experts say agriculture rather than industry exerts the biggest toll on the environment.

The effect is a downward spiral: poverty and land degradation feed each other. Last year, China produced 600 million tonnes of food — the 12th straight annual rise. But over the next three decades some 300 million Chinese are expected to abandon once productive fields for jobs in the city. Valuable arable land is gnawed away to build urban clusters, where the consumption of meat, grain and diary products is far higher. The average Chinese now eats 63 kg of meat a year, with an additional 30 kg per person expected by 2030. Already, 70% of China’s corn is used to feed livestock rather than the populace.