Abstrcat Based on detailed surveys and modificatory data of land, the relational investigations and statistical data in Zhongxian County during 1996-2003, the basic trend and its main causes of cultivated land use change are analyzed. The result shows that the trend of cultivated land quantity is decreasing in general; the cultivated rate of land is 38.57% in 2003, the area of middle-low yield farmland accounts for 73.31% of the total cultivated land in Zhongxian County, the reserve resource of cultivated land only occupies 8.50% of the total exploitative reserve land; the loss intensity of cultivated land is 0.56 hm~2/(km~(2)·a) and its quality is going down; the area of cultivated land returning to forest, changing cultivated land into garden land and flooded cultivated land respectively account for 56.37%, 25.77% and 13.22% of the total decreased of cultivated land during the last 8 years in Zhongxian County. Some key channels for farmland protection are put forward, such as strict control of farmland occupation for non-agricultural constructions, improving the relative economic benefits of cultivated land, strengthening the arrangement and restoration of cultivated land, doing well the major synthetical regulation for the basic construction of irrigation and water conservancy and strict control of population quantity, and so on