Abstract: Grassland which covers 41.7% of the land area is the biggest terrestrial ecosystem of China, with an area at about 0.4 billion hm². Grassland is not only the key resources for modern agriculture and animal husbandry, but also the critical defense for country’s ecosystem safety. However, because of the longtime unreasonable exploitation and utilization, the grassland are facing serious problems such as degrading ecological system, decreasing productivity, prominent conflicts between grass and livestock, low efficiency in animal production, etc. Because of the decreasing of the ecological and productive functions, the grassland area has become one of the limited areas for sustainable development strategy of China. Exploiting the potential of grassland production systematically and sustainably and improving the ecological and productive function of the grassland effectively are the key guarantees for reinforcing ecological safety and ecological civilization construction, accelerating the transformation and development of modern animal husbandry industry. There are three approaches to exploit the potential of grassland productivity. First, reconstruction of the degraded grasslands and improvement of the productivity of natural grasslands. Second, construction of the dry land artificial pasture. Third, development of high efficiency grass industry. Methods such as natural restoration, optimized utilization, and artificially development et al can be taken according to the degrading condition of the grasslands. As a result, these methods can accelerate the process of grassland restoration and improve the grassland productivity by 20% to 30%, even up to 40%-50%. Concerning the limitation of water and soil resources, in semiarid areas, the emphases should be put on changing crop land into forage land and developing dry cultivated pasture; breeding good quality forage varieties with the characteristics of drought resistance, cold hardiness, and grazing tolerance by exploiting the potential of native forage genetic resources. Improvement of the usage efficiency of water and soil resources and dry land productive efficiency by developing and using dryland cultivating technology, harvesting and processing technology, soil conservation technology, are all effective technologies. Through these development methods, grassland productivity can be increased by two to three times. In areas with sufficient and balanced water and heat resources, high efficiency water-saving irrigated artificial pasture should be constructed appropriately according to the local hydrological conditions. Assuming that if the productivity of this high efficient irrigated pasture can be improved by 10 to 20 times, the annual forage yield will be increased by 15 to 30 million tons, which is about the yield of 2 to 4 million ha natural grassland. Suggestions were put forward on guarantee of tapping the grassland potential continuous. First, taking full advantage of the driving function of grassland eco-compensation policy. It needs pushing on the transformation of the development mode to encourage the optimized management of grassland with the category of grass-animal balance. Second, carrying out the research and development actions to tap grassland productive potential sustainably. The key research and develop actions including the integration and demonstration of critical techniques to increase natural grassland productivity, the model and demonstration of high efficiency grass-animal husbandry industry techniques in semi farm semi herd areas, the technique choke points in forage production and procession to improve the usage efficiency of forages. Third, constructing modern grass industry demonstration in different areas. By constructing regional demonstration plot according to the grassland characters and areas, and building whole industrial chain, achieve the integration and optimal allocation of all kinds of resources. Forth, cultivating new business entities, improving and perfecting the market system, boosting the development of grass economics.

Key words: potential of grassland production, grassland restoration, cultivated pasture on dryland, irrigated cultivated pasture