HOHHOT, Dec. 17 (Xinhua) -- On a snow-covered prairie in north China, Ting Bater, 65, herds cattle on his ranch, where he enjoys seeing wildlife such as roe deer, badger and crane.

He is grateful that his ranch retains such vitality. Located on the northern edge of Hunshandake Sandland, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the grassland had been in danger of creeping desertification of the sandland.

Hunshandake, meaning "yellow wild horse" in Mongolian, is one of the four largest sand lands in north China. Its southern edge is only 180 km north of Beijing, and its average altitude is more than 1,000 meters higher than Beijing.

In the 1990s, Hunshandake expanded to the north and the south. Where Ting Bater lives in Sarultuya Village, Abag Banner, Xilingol League, the grassland was desertified.

Ting Bater said veteran herders knew that overgrazing of sheep was a main cause of the desertification, as sheep dig and eat the roots of the grass, while cows only eat the tip of the grass.

In 1998, he took the lead in the village and sold his 200-plus sheep, replaced them with more than 40 cows and divided more than 393 hectares of his ranch into nine areas for the cows to rotate grazing in.

He also planted trees and grass and protects wildlife. Now there are more than 270 plant species and more than 100 varieties of wild animals on his ranch.

With his pioneering, local herdsmen followed suit to decrease the total number of sheep in stock from 10,000 in 2001 to more than 300 now and raise cattle.

Since 2000, under a sand control project in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, 2.37 billion yuan (362 million U.S. dollars) of government funding has been appropriated to curb the desertification of Hunshandake.

With the joint efforts by the governments and herders, Hunshandake now has 897,333 hectares of forest areas and 3.57 million hectares of grassland.

Data from the National Forestry and Grassland Administration shows that since 2016, 2.267 million hectares of forest and grass vegetation areas have been increased in four major sandland areas in Inner Mongolia and 169,000 hectares of desertified land have been turned green. Enditem