Definition of "nongrain"

Most of the chronically poor counties in Yunnan Province in the late 1970s tended to specialize in nongrain crops in the late 1950s. That was particularly true of ten counties, almost half the provincial total of chronically poor counties, located in two contiguous prefectures, Wenshan and Hungho, in tropical southeastern Yunnan.

1983, Nicholas R. Lardy, “Living standards and the distribution of income”, in Agriculture in China's modern economic development‎, Cambridge University Press, page 185