During the past four decades，agriculture and rural development in China has scored a greatprogress. Organization institution in agriculture is one of the domains with drastic innovations. The purposeof this paper is to map the emergence and evolution of various agricultural organizations in China since 1978. Development status and the trend of agricultural organization system are analyzed. Further，the role offarmer cooperatives is discussed. Data used in the paper are mainly from statistical yearbooks anddocuments published by the government including Ministry of Agriculture and Bureau of Industry andCommercial. Both descriptive and deductive analyses are adopted to achieve different analytical purposes. Some explicit findings are derived from the analysis. First，the vast small-farm sector，co-existence of various types of organizations，and innovation ofother organizations will continue and sustain for a long-time period in China. Second，despite the fast development ofmodern farmers and various organizations，it is important that traditional farmers participate effectively inmodern agriculture. Third，farmers act collectively via a cooperative in a desirable way，which determines thecentral position of farmer cooperatives in the agricultural organization system.