[Objective] In China, food is a fundamental necessity for the people and represents a key national interest. Food security is vital for economic development, social stability, and national security. However, current research often features relatively short time series data, and the vital role of irrigation as a key factor in grain production has been largely overlooked. This oversight has hindered the effective elucidation of the patterns of contribution from diverse production factors across regions and stages. Regarding food security strategy, data from 31 province-level regions in China were analyzed using grain production as a metric. During this analysis, we quantified the impact and variations of different factors on regional grain production from 1949 to 2020. The analysis was conducted at the different geographical scale. This study aims to identify the primary driving factors and provide insights to support the stable growth of grain production in China. [Methods] To achieve this goal, a model was constructed using the Cobb-Douglas function, with grain production as the dependent variable. The explanatory variables introduced into the model comprised practitioners in the primary industry, agricultural machinery power, effective irrigation area, net fertilizer quantity, affected area, and cropping index. Additionally, a random error term was incorporated into the model. To address issues of multicollinearity among the data, ridge regression was used to fit the model. The values required for machinery, effective irrigation area, net fertilizer quantity, and affected area in the model were calculated by multiplying the total power of agricultural machinery, effective irrigation area of farmland, net quantity of fertilizer for agricultural production, and total affected area for agriculture by the proportion of grain-sowing area to the total sowing area of crops. [Results] The research results indicated a continuous increase in the contribution of effective irrigation area and net fertilizer quantity to grain production in China, while the elasticity coefficients of the practitioners in the primary industry and cropping index on grain output have significantly decreased. Additionally, the contribution of mechanical power to grain production first increased and then decreased, and the impact of the affected area on grain yield reduction strengthened before weakening. Notably, the elasticity coefficient of the effective irrigation area on grain production in China has increased from 0.155 (1949—1959) to 0.424 (2000—2020), making it the primary driving factor for the increase in grain production. Moreover, the impact of various production factors on grain yield tended toward equilibrium, and the significant contribution of individual factors considerably decreased over time. In the future, ensuring food security will require a coordinated approach involving multiple factors, with the effective irrigation area serving as the foundational component. Additionally, the impact of random error terms such as prices, seeds, and policies in grain production has gradually increased, requiring increased attention in the future. Furthermore, the grain transportation pattern of China is determined by the alignment of population, land, and water. In recent years, the northward expansion of effective irrigation areas and the southward shift of the population center have jointly facilitated the transformation of the grain transportation pattern of China from south-to-north to north-to-south. In the near future, as the population gradually moves southward and faces limitations on southern farmland, the north-to-south grain transportation pattern can persist and may even intensify. [Conclusions] The research findings indicated that effective irrigation area plays a crucial role in coordinating the configuration of agricultural production factors. In the future, maximizing the water resource allocation function of the national water network is vital. Therefore, the construction and expansion of the national water network will enhance water resource security and support the expansion of irrigation scale, thereby facilitating a synergistic combination of multiple factors to promote grain production.
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