Science and Technology Backyard (STB) — China Agricultural University's In-Village Farmer Knowledge-Transfer Model

In 2009, agronomist Zhang Fusuo of China Agricultural University (CAU) founded the first "Science and Technology Backyard" (STB) in Baizhai village, Quzhou County, Hebei Province: a research station where graduate students live alongside farmers year-round, diagnosing field-specific problems and co-developing management practices, instead of transferring knowledge one-way from lab to farm.
The model scaled rapidly. By the mid-2020s, CAU and partner universities had established roughly 5,700 backyards across China, involving 290 higher-education institutions and more than 10,000 students (China Daily, 2026).
A nationwide evaluation of the related upscaling campaign, published in Nature (Cui et al., 2018), tracked a network of 1,152 researchers who worked with 20.9 million smallholder farmers managing 37.7 million hectares across 452 counties. Farmers who adopted the recommended practices achieved average yield increases of 10.8–11.5% for maize, rice and wheat, cut nitrogen fertiliser use by 14.7–18.1%, and produced combined economic gains from higher yields and input savings estimated at US$12.2 billion, alongside measurably lower greenhouse-gas emissions per tonne of grain.
Since 2019, Chinese universities have exported the model abroad, establishing 14 backyards in 10 countries, including Kenya and Malawi, to support smallholder food security.
Caution: the evaluated results come from the broader national upscaling campaign built on the STB model, not a single controlled trial of the original Quzhou site, and the approach depends on a continuous supply of subsidised graduate-student labour plus university and government funding — conditions that may not transfer easily to countries without China's extension infrastructure.

Read the full analysis: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/agricultural-sustainability-project-reached-209-million-farmers-across-china