Rice-fish system (“fish” refers to a wide range of aquatic animals including fish, prawn, shrimp, crabs, soft shell turtles, etc. in this study), one of the integrated agro-aquaculture system (IAAS), integrates rice production with aquaculture to obtain more and diversified food and a better environment. In the last decades, diversified rice-fish systems have been developed in China. In this study, we conduct a farmer survey on the rice-fish integration based farms (RF-farm) and their corresponding rice monoculture farms (RM-farm) by means of pair sampling method. Five types of the RF-farms that included rice-carp, rice-loach, rice-crayfish, rice-crab and rice-turtle, totally 153 pair of samples, were selected. We compared the farm management, farming activities, yields of rice and fish, nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide application rate, economic output and input/output ratio of sampled farms. Our survey showed that the land scale of 90% of RF-farms was 1 to 50 hm2. Forty-seven percent of the RF-farms were run in “Specialized Farmers Cooperatives” while 29.4% and 24% of the RF-farms were run in family farm and agricultural company, respectively. The average age of RF-farms’ owners was 44 years old, and 97.2% of them graduated from high school or better educated. Compared to their corresponding rice monoculture, rice grain yield of the five types of RF-farms did not decreased. For farms of rice-carp, rice-crab and rice-crayfish, rice yield was almost the same as RM- farms. For the farms of rice-loach and rice-turtle, rice yields were 3.77% and 6.93% higher than RM- farms respectively. RF-farms also produced a substantial aquatic production. The yields of fish in the five types of RF-farms were (1.19 ± 0.08) t/hm2. The average use of pesticides in the five types of RF-farms was (6.21 ± 0.62) kg a.i./hm2, which was 59.73% lower than that in RM-farms. The average use of nitrogen fertilizer in the five types of RF-farms was (128.40 ± 8.03) kg N/hm2, which was 33.63% lower than in RM-farms. The average total economic output in the five types of RF-farms was (69 800 ± 41 200) yuan/hm2. Compared to their corresponding RM-farms, which average output is (26 000 ± 3 400) yuan/hm2, the total economic output of rice-carp, rice-crab, rice-crayfish, rice-turtle and rice-loach increased by 205%, 78%, 156%, 710%, and 480%, respectively. For the ratio of input to output, the RF-farms had a significantly lower ratio (0.47 ± 0.16) than the RM-farms (0.66 ± 0.17). These results suggested that the construction and promotion of rice-fish farms can ensure a sustainable development of rice-fish systems.