Switch to drip irrigation helps preserve aquifers

Millet is no longer a popular staple food in China, but the drought-tolerant crop is playing a role in controlling desertification in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

Yaoba, an area plagued by drought in Alxa League, near the Tengger Desert, gets a little over 100 millimeters of rain a year. That left farmers reliant on water drawn from aquifers to irrigate the corn they grew on the area's 4,000 hectares of farmland, using a technique known as basin irrigation, in which fields are flooded.

"I basin irrigated my 100-hectare cornfield five times a year," 40-year-old farmer He Zirong said, adding that roughly 700 metric tons of water were required by each hectare of corn every year.