Shenzhen Government Online
Shenzhen institute harvests perennial rice
From: Shenzhen Daily
Updated: 2021-11-26 09:11

Shenzhen research institute BGI-Research harvested perennial rice at its experimental base’s paddy fields in Dapeng New Area on Wednesday, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily reported.


This is Shenzhen’s first experimental planting of perennial rice, which is likely to be promoted nationwide and even worldwide.


Perennial rice is a type of long-lived rice that is capable of sprouting season after season without reseeding.


Hu Fengyi, a professor at Yunnan University, said that the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations began advocating perennial crops in the 1970s, and scientists all over the world have since been working to shift crop production mode from annual to perennial crops.


According to Hu, their team has cultivated their own perennial rice species, with the help of a Shenzhen gene sequencing team, which has become the world’s first and only commercially viable perennial grain crop, following more than 20 years’ research.


The most notable feature of Hu’s perennial rice is that the axillary buds of underground stems can survive the winter and grow new seedlings in the second year under favorable conditions.


“Planting perennial rice disrupts the traditional agricultural production mode and brings very good economic and ecological benefits to agricultural production,” Wang Ren, director of China National GeneBank, was quoted as saying in the Daily report.


Wang said that planting perennial rice not only greatly saves labor costs, but also helps reduce rice planting carbon emissions.


Perennial rice can save 2-3 kilograms of seeds and the labor of five to six people per mu (1 mu equals to 666.67 square meters) per season, and the harvestable rice yield is the same as that of local conventional rice varieties.


Through no-till farming, 20 kilograms of carbon dioxide can be offset, and 54 kilograms of soil organic matter can be added per mu every year.


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