Progress and Prospects of Crop Cultivation and Farming System in China

Global population growth and rising incomes are driving sustained increases in food demand, while climate change and resource constraints impose severe challenges on production capacity. As a core discipline of agricultural science, “crop cultivation and farming system” develops theories, technologies, and patterns that not only significantly increase yields, but also improve resource use efficiency, and promote sustainable agriculture, playing a pivotal role in balancing food security with ecological protection. This study synthesizes the system’s conceptual foundations, theoretical framework, and the evolutionary trajectory of its technical structure. It highlights major contributions to securing national food supplies, increasing yield potential, improving product quality and nutrition, stimulating varietal innovation, and promoting sustainable agricultural development. The system’s development is hindered by insufficient long-term institutional support, evaluation regimes that dilute disciplinary influence, acute talent shortages, underexploited distinctive strengths, low visibility of technological advances, and limited integration with frontier technologies. In response to climate change, China has opened unprecedented opportunities for the discipline by expanding grain capacity by more than 50 million metric tons, upgrading agricultural socialized service systems, and catalyzing cross-disciplinary innovation. To capitalize on these opportunities, a "Five-sphere Integrated Plan" development pathway is proposed: (1) Strengthen basic research via long-term, networked field observatories; (2) Integrate theory and technology to enrich disciplinary content; (3) Tackle mission-critical technologies aligned with national strategies; (4) Accelerate translation through productization and scaling to expand impact; (5) Build a sustainable talent-training system. This framework provides strategic guidance for the transformation and advancement of the crop cultivation and farming system.