Across China: Man's 26-year fight against desertification

Biting wind, baking sun, sand, sand and more sand. This is what Feng Qi has put up with every day for the last 26 years.

Feng, 50, a geologist, is no stranger to sand. Born in the northwestern loess plateau, he has known the power of sand since he was a child.

"Sandstorms came every spring and swallowed the whole sky. It was suffocating," he says.

Crops barely grow in deserts, meaning food supply is limited.

"We only ate steamed buns made of wheat bran. It was difficult to digest, so I was often constipated," Feng says.

Such deeply-felt childhood scares motivated Feng to choose geography in college. He wanted to change the desolate environment he was used to.

Heihe, a branch of the Yellow River, was his first assignment. Back in the 1980s, the water table of Heihe basin dramatically degraded due to climate change and human activity, resulting in frequent sandstorms.

Feng, then a student in Lanzhou Institute of Desert Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed his tutor to look for solutions.

Sand control is not possible behind closed doors. Most of the time, Feng and his teammates stayed outside, sometimes for months, collecting data.

Their efforts eventually paid off. Traditionally, experts believe arbor forests are most effective for water conservation, but Feng and his team found that a combination of grassland, open forest and woodland worked better.

"The area of woodland should be no more than 15 percent in upper basins of inland rivers like Heihe. This could cut soil erosion by 40 percent," Feng says.

Thanks to Feng, Heihe basin's economic losses from natural disasters such as sandstorms, drought and salinization have declined by 60 percent since 2000. His methods have been successfully applied in other northwestern areas in Gansu and Qinghai.

In 2003, Feng turned to Gansu's Minqin Country, one of the four main sandstorm areas in China.

Surrounded by two large deserts -- Tengger Desert and Badain Jaran Desert, ferocious sandstorms force many to leave Minqin.

Sand control experts tried several methods to fix the sand, but none worked. But Feng did not rush. He stayed, took his time, and did research for a long period before finding a solution.

He designed a six-level sand control system, planting different vegetation in sand dunes, sandy land and desert, effectively containing the occurrence of sandstorms.

Under Feng's watch, Qingtu Lake was revived in 2010 after having been dry for 51 years. The number of sandstorms in Minqin decreased from six in 2007 to only one in 2011.

Local farmers have been encouraged by Feng to join desertification control and make money out of the sand by planting Saxaul, a shrub that can endure drought. Saxaul has a parasitic plant, Cistanche deserticola, that grows on its roots, but fortunately this parasitic plant is known in traditional Chinese medicine as "Ginseng of the desert" and can sell at 140 yuan (20 U.S dollars) per kilo. Out in the desert where so little grows, it may as well be gold.

Feng's accomplishments have earned him many titles, but even in his fifties, he still won't leave the meager soil.

"Sand control never ends," he says. "But I will persist because I want to see more green hills and clean water." Endi