Growing japonica rice with more confidence, where does our confidence come from?
"Old Li, for the one-season late japonica Yongyou 12, the 1000-grain weight is more than 23 grams, right?" At the "Hunan Province New Japonica Rice Variety Field Observation Meeting" held on October 14, Liu Nianxi, member of the Party Leadership Group of the Hunan Provincial Agricultural Commission and chief agronomist, casually pulled up a rice ear, weighed the grains in his hand, and shouted to Li Luobin, who was in the field.
"More than that, a full 26 grams. A few days ago we did a theoretical field yield estimate, and this nearly 12 mu of japonica rice yielded 938.4 kg per mu. Japonica rice is high-yielding and efficient, and we are more confident about growing japonica rice." The 72-year-old "old model worker" Li Luobin answered directly and quickly.
National model worker Li Luobin is the head of the Quantangzi Agricultural Technology Station in Yuhu District, Xiangtan City, Hunan Province. The Quantangzi 100-mu japonica rice high-yield demonstration plot is one of 32 trial planting demonstration sites distributed across Hunan this year. In accordance with the State Council's deployment to launch "early indica and late japonica" in the double-cropping rice area of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, Hunan, a "major rice province," began introducing japonica rice in 2013 to further optimize the grain structure, improve rice quality, and increase farmers' income, and has now expanded the suitable planting areas.
As soon as he saw the reporter, Li Luobin, who has worked with farming all his life, listed the five major benefits of japonica rice: it can reduce heavy metal cadmium pollution, it can avoid the harm of cold dew wind, it can realize full mechanization of rice production, it can improve rice quality, and it can increase farmers' yields and incomes. For farmers, the last two are crucial. Li Luobin introduced that in terms of increasing yields and incomes, japonica rice can not only increase yield by 100-200 kg per mu, with the increased portion bringing an income increase of 150-300 yuan, but also, under protective price purchasing, japonica rice is 20 yuan higher per 50 kg than indica rice, which can increase farmers' income by 300 yuan per mu. Adding the two together, this can increase farmers' income by 400-600 yuan per mu, which can reduce abandoned farmland and the phenomenon of "changing double cropping to single cropping"; in terms of rice quality, because the amylose content of japonica rice is significantly lower than that of indica rice and the gel consistency is significantly higher than that of indica rice, its palatability is better than that of indica rice. Promoting late japonica rice is conducive to the out-of-province sales of Hunan rice.
Liu Dengkui, deputy director of the Hunan Provincial General Station of Agricultural Technology Extension, introduced that the 2013 trial planting results showed that the Yongyou series and other indica-japonica hybrid rice widely trial-planted in Hunan generally increased yield by more than 40 kg per mu compared with adjacent late indica rice planted at the same time. This year the growth has been very promising, and the yield-increasing performance of late japonica rice will be even more outstanding.