Due to the impacts of various restrictive factors on the quality and ecological measurement of farmland, the current “trinity” pattern of farmland protection is still mainly controlled by quantity in the implementation process, which is out of line with food security and low-carbon society in the new era, and it is urgent to build a transformation system of farmland protection for high-quality agricultural development. Combined with relevant statistical data, literature view, and the new requirement of high-quality agricultural development on farmland protection, this paper examined the status and practical difficulties of farmland protection and explored the transformation path of farmland protection under the pattern of high-quality agricultural development. Results indicated that the high-quality agricultural development requires that the protection of farmland should take the production function and ecological function into consideration and achieve the two following goals together: the food security and carbon emission reduction. However，there are still some problems in China, including the contradiction between protecting farmland and economic development, the increasing carbon emission from farmland, and the difficulty in coordinating farmland protection and ecological protection, which hinder the high-quality agricultural development. To achieve the high-quality development of agriculture, the transformation path of China’s farmland protection can be explored from three aspects: “ontology, topological relationship, and scientific & technological help”, that is, transforming the connotation of farmland itself, changing the current farmland to the connotation of farmland; shifting strictly protecting farmland to strictly controlling the quantity, intensity and ecology of construction land; applying technological innovation to achieve green and efficient farmland production from all aspects of farmland production. Therefore, this paper suggests: reasonably arranging crops and crop structure according to the suitability of farmland, using land remediation to improve the ecology of farmland to reduce carbon emissions, strictly controlling the total amount of construction land according to the new round of national land space planning to ensure stable high-quality farmland availability, and further improving agricultural advanced technology to achieve green production of farmland; and formulating relevant incentive policies to guide scientific researchers and farmers to voluntarily protect farmland from the bottom-up.