Revolutionary rice thrives on Loess Plateau

A SALINE soil rice R&D team led by hybrid rice pioneer Yuan Longping, is expecting a harvest from a test field on the Loess Plateau, the world’s highest soil erosion area.

The test field in Nanniwan, about 50 kilometers from the city of Yan’an in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, is among six bases selected to pilot the team’s rice growing technique.

Liu Zhaoliang, from Qingdao Yuance Biological Group, said the team had grown 53 hectares of rice which would be harvested this week. The per-hectare yield is expected to be 6 tons, which meets the target for the pilot project.

“The barren land has been extensively treated and we are using smart farming technology to control growing conditions,” said Liu.

Yuan Longping’s team is best known for developing a strain of saline-alkali tolerant rice in the coastal city of Qingdao.

They are also having success in creating drought-resistant rice varieties in Dubai.

Nanniwan is at high altitude, and was where, in the 1940s, Mao Zedong mobilized the revolutionary spirit to reclaim farmland from the parched soil to guarantee the security of the revolution’s grain supply.

However, paddies in Nanniwan declined from 467 hectares then to about 20 hectares today. Yields are low compared to more favorable regions.

Traditional farming techniques can only extract about 3 tons of rice per hectare, far lower than the average yield on the plains.

Liu said the team expects to take as much as five years to fully recover the rice fields to the previous 467 hectares and raise the per-hectare yield to 9 tons.

About two-thirds of the people in China depend on rice as their staple food.

Yuan, who developed the world’s first hybrid rice in 1974, has set multiple records for rice yields. In his latest feat of agricultural immensity, set in a super-hybrid paddy in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, his team managed to squeeze 17 tons of rice out of each hectare.

Yuan’s researchers selected six testing bases in May this year with different soil conditions in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, as well as Shandong and Zhejiang provinces in east China.

The plan is an attempt to introducing smart farming techniques and drought-resistant rice strains to these areas and develop water-saving farms suitable for their harsh soil conditions.