Editing Great Leap Forward (section)

===Crop production experiments===
{{see also|Lysenkoism}}
[[File:People's daily 13 Aug 1958 .jpg|thumb|A ''[[People's Daily]]'' front-page report on 13 August 1958, that the Macheng Jianguo commune in Hubei had set a record in early rice]]

On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these innovations were based on [[Lysenkoism|the ideas]] of now-discredited Soviet agronomist [[Trofim Lysenko]] and his followers. The policies included close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more densely than normal on the incorrect assumption that seeds of the same class would not compete with each other. Yang provides data on the failure of close planting techniques, which reduced yields in Anhui from 400 jin per mu to less than 200 jin per mu due to overcrowded plants competing for nutrients and sunlight."{{sfnp|Yang|2012|p={{page needed|date=June 2024}}}}{{sfnp|Dikötter|2010|p=39}} [[Deep plowing]] was encouraged on the mistaken belief that this would yield plants with extra large root systems.{{Citation needed|date=March 2019}} Moderately productive land was left unplanted based on the belief that concentrating manure and effort on the most fertile land would lead to large productivity gains per-acre. Altogether, these untested innovations generally led to decreases in grain production rather than increases.{{sfnp|Hinton|1984|pp=[https://archive.org/details/shenfan00hint/page/236 236]–245}}

Meanwhile, local leaders were pressured into falsely reporting ever-higher grain production figures to their political superiors. Participants at political meetings remembered production figures being inflated up to 10 times their actual production amounts as the race to please superiors and win plaudits—like the chance to meet Mao himself—intensified. The state was later able to force many production groups to sell more grain than they could spare based on these false production figures.{{sfnp|Hinton|1984|pp=[https://archive.org/details/shenfan00hint/page/234 234]–240, 247–249}}