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The pursuit of the sustainable agriculture often ignores to consider the ecological benefits. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to evaluate the ecological impacts related to the sustainable development. Therefore, to assess the overall ecological impact of crop production in 31 provinces in China, this study proposes to set up a non-monetary framework and indicators based on Emergy theory. Further analysis focuses on sustainable ecosystem under three different planting scenarios to identify the driving factors. The results demonstrated that the ecosystem disservice of crop production processes is greater than the services. The total emergy inputs, fertilizers used and R%, all of these can affect the ecological benefits. Furthermore, simply changing the cultivation pattern cannot achieve a balance between ecology and economy, there is no doubt that other method needed are needed. These findings provide valuable insights for developing appropriate policies for decision makers. • Establishing a framework to calculate the agri-ecosystem services and dis-services. • Analyzing the ecological benefits of crop system in the three different scenarios. • Building three emergy-based ecosystem service indicators to assess the crop system. • Proposing some feasible advices from ecological benefits perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]