BEIJING: Output of China’s hybrid rice at a demonstration base in Dechang county of Southwest China’s Sichuan Province with the technique developed by “father of hybrid rice” Yuan Longping reached a record high of 1,251 kilograms per mu on Saturday.

The rice in the demonstration field showed vigorous growth, uniform development, large and abundant grains, high grain-setting rate, good late-stage coloration, and no significant signs of pests and diseases, said Cheng Shihua, the leader of the project’s inspection expert group and the chief scientist of China’s national rice industry technology system.

“Such a high yield has been a pleasant surprise, resulting from the perfect integration of rice varieties and cultivation techniquesin the Anning Valley region,” Cheng said.

The inspection for the hybrid rice project was held on Saturday in Dechang county, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. The average yield per mu of the three plots randomly selected in the demonstration base was 1,251.5 kilograms, setting a new world record for the single-season yield of hybrid rice.

The expert group randomly selected three rice fields for mechanical harvesting, followed by water measurement, impurity removal, and weighing after threshing. The number one field yielded 1,316.5 kilograms per mu, number two yielded 1,249.4 kilograms per mu, and number three field yielded 1,188.6 kilograms per mu, with an average yield of 1,251.5 kilograms per mu for the three plots.

The target of yielding 18 tons per hectare (1,200 kilograms per mu) of hybrid rice was proposed by Yuan back in 2018 and the Chengdu Branch of China National Hybrid Rice Engineering Research Center conducted related research in Dechang county in the same year.

The demonstration hybrid rice base covers a total area of 110 mu, and the variety planted was “grain double superior 8022.”

The rice variety was sown for dry nursery on March 20,2023, and transplanted from April 24 to May 5. Technical measures such as early sowing and sparse seeding for nursery, fixed-row spacing transplanting, soil testing and formula fertilization, scientific water management, and integrated pest and disease control were adopted in the nursery of the demonstration field.

Chinese scientist Yuan, widely known as the “father of hybrid rice,” and his research team successfully cultivated the world’s first high-yield hybrid rice strain in 1973.

Over the past five decades, China’s self-developed hybrid rice has been promoted in an accumulative cultivated area of 9 billion mu cross the country, helping increase a total rice yield of 800 billion kilograms, according to the latest hybrid rice cultivation data was released during an international seminar held in central China’s Hunan Province on Wednesday.

So far, dozens of countries around the globe have carried out research and trial planting of hybrid rice, while the overseas annual cultivated area of hybrid rice has reached nearly 8 million hectares in total, Xinhua News Agency reported citing Bai Lianyang, an official from the Hunan Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Published Date: October 17, 2023