Climate change has increased the frequency of natural disasters, posing growing challenges to the high-quality development of the grain industry. Using China‘s provincial panel data from 2010 to 2023, this study examines the direct, moderating, and spatial effects of natural disasters on the high-quality development of the grain industry. A multidimensional index of high-quality development is constructed using the CRITIC weighting method. The results show that natural disasters significantly hinder the high-quality development of the grain industry, and this finding remains robust across a series of robustness tests. Further analysis indicates that agricultural irrigation and rural internet penetration mitigate the adverse effects of natural disasters, suggesting that both engineering resilience and digital resilience enhance the adaptive capacity of grain production systems. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the negative impacts are more pronounced in major grain-producing regions and in the central, western, and northeastern regions of China. In addition, the spatial econometric results reveal significant negative spatial spillover effects, indicating that disaster shocks extend beyond directly affected regions through spatial interactions. This study contributes to the literature by extending disaster-impact research from grain output losses to the high-quality development of the grain industry, integrating engineering and digital resilience resources within a unified analytical framework, and providing new evidence on the spatial spillover effects of natural disasters.