A project manager by training, Yang Chengyu now leads farmland protection in Changde City. His focus is clear: make policy accessible, and make the numbers work for farmers. When Hunan Province launched its reform to integrate flood-drought prevention with farmland replacement in 2025, Changde was chosen as a pioneer city. But for Yang, the work started months earlier.

Appointed as the head of the Farmland Protection Supervision Section in June 2024, Yang faced an immediate challenge: an 8,300-mu farmland restoration target and the government's upcoming reform. Rather than issuing directives from his office, he partnered with the local mapping institute to conduct a baseline survey of the city's farmland and permanent basic cropland. "You can't grasp reality from behind a desk," he insists, a principle he applies to every undertaking.

This investigative-first approach is his signature. Previously, when Changde's natural resource supervision ranked poorly, he methodically visited counties, pinpointing issues and who was responsible. Discovering that grassroots teams lacked technical know-how rather than willpower, he authored a remediation manual and introduced three new systems in response. The result? A compliance rate of 99% and a leap in rankings from the bottom to the top tier province-wide. His relentless site visits have also built a habit: after each trip, he documents findings and ideas, drafting reports that he refines through team feedback, building a repository of practical insights.

Through conversations with farmers, Yang learned their real calculus—economics, not directives. They avoid steep slopes and gravitate toward accessible, fertile plots. Recognizing this, he has compiled a mental map of the region's needs. "Farmers don't fear reform itself; they fear losing out," he notes, after eight months of groundwork sorting which land should stay in crops, revert to forest, or be exchanged. This groundwork supplies the evidence and confidence he relies on.

To Yang, the spatial inefficiency of land distribution is systemic. Changde's landscape is mostly hills, mountains, and plains, with arable plots on slopes that are impractical to farm alongside forested patches breaking up the flatlands. A purely restrictive approach, he argues, cannot protect quantity or profitability. In March 2025, the provincial plan tasked seven departments—from agriculture to finance—with cooperative implementation, making their efforts more powerful. Through "forest-farmland exchange," the team relocates inefficient cropland uphill and converts low-yield forests at lower elevations into rich arable soil, actively rebalancing the overall layout.

Selecting the right pilot sites is painstaking. Yang evaluates slope, water access, boundaries, and transport, but most critically, he asks whether the local community is willing to participate. This core question shapes his decision-making. In Hanshou County, his team cleared poplar groves from a large farm's center, turning 18 mu of scattered trees into productive vegetable fields, adding 30,000 to 40,000 yuan annually for farmer Li Minjie. In another town, similarly converted land now supports a large-scale farmer who has mechanized his entire 800-mu operation. Pairing willing participants with suitable land relies on Yang's extensive knowledge of the entire city's assets. By building a "dating platform" to match farmers with surplus low-yield land to those needing it, the municipal government coordinates optimal, city-wide arrangements that single villages can't achieve alone. After one year, the pilot counties have seen 11,300 mu of new farmland, 101,100 mu upgraded, and 20,500 mu exchanged.

Yang’s focus on practical results stems from a formative experience. In 2011, he helped an elderly couple navigate the maze for their dilapidated home's renovation permits. Their frustrated complaints stayed with him, teaching him that his duty is to uphold fairness. Now, he channels this into transparent calculations for farmers. For one farmer whose low-yield cropland bordered a forest, Yang facilitated an exchange for oil-tea camellia planting, a land conversion that promises higher yields, supplementing initial losses with policy support. When the farmer received the province's first certificate for exchanged farmland in September 2025, it validated Yang's assertion: "People are reasonable. If they see clear benefits, they'll be supportive." He also champions grassroots innovation, like helping a struggling community convert sloping farmland back to forest, ensuring the overall balance by creating an equivalent area of quality cropland elsewhere.

Changde's high-quality arable land has now seen consecutive years of net increase. Yet Yang's aspiration is not short-term metrics. He reminds his colleagues that work must genuinely benefit people and withstand scrutiny. "I just want to ensure that when I look back, there are no regrets," he says, embodying a philosophy of durable, people-centered stewardship.