Shizuishan Ningjiao No. 1 passed the autonomous region's variety approval

The dehydrated sweet pepper variety "Tianxi No. 1", bred by Ren Tianxi, senior agronomist at the Shizuishan City Agricultural Technology Extension Center, and others, passed the review of the autonomous region's Crop Variety Approval Committee in early March and was officially named "Ningjiao No. 1", marking that the variety has been approved for large-scale promotion and planting throughout the region. This is the first new dehydrated vegetable variety in the autonomous region to pass approval, filling the gap that Ningxia's dehydrated vegetables had no variety with independent intellectual property rights.

Dehydrated vegetables are one of the leading industries in Shizuishan City's agricultural development, and sweet pepper is the main product in dehydrated vegetable processing. The sweet peppers planted by farmers in Shizuishan City were mainly Qiemen Sweet Pepper No. 1. Due to many years of planting, viral diseases, phytophthora blight and other diseases occurred severely in the variety, resulting in problems such as low yield and even total crop failure.

In 2003, the Shizuishan City Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Bureau organized agricultural technicians to conduct an inspection in Inner Mongolia. Ren Tianxi accidentally discovered a variant sweet pepper plant that was growing very robustly and bore many fruits, so he brought it back. During repeated trials, the agricultural technicians found that this variety had strong early growth vigor, a high number of fruits, and the advantages of high and stable yield, strong adaptability, fast fruit reddening, and virus resistance. Moreover, testing by the Agricultural Product Quality Testing Center of the autonomous region's Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences showed that the dried red pepper products produced from this variety had a relatively high vitamin content and were suitable for dehydrated processing production.