Research on cotton floating seedling technology achieves success

The cotton floating seedling technology, long regarded as a "forbidden zone," has been successfully breached. The national "Tenth Five-Year" key research project and the national "863" major special project - cotton floating seedling technology, led by Hunan Agricultural University - recently passed appraisal by an expert panel.

Since cotton was first cultivated, it has always been an upland crop, vulnerable to waterlogging damage, so traditional cotton seedling cultivation regarded floating seedling cultivation as a forbidden zone. Starting in 2000, the research team led by Professor Chen Jinxiang of Hunan Agricultural University began the "forbidden-zone-breaking campaign," and after nearly 5 years of arduous research they succeeded. They not only developed this cotton floating seedling technology, which was still a blank in the world at the time, but also made breakthroughs in the research and application of materialized products such as nutrient solutions and culture substrates. Experts believe that this method has notable effects in saving seed, saving labor, increasing yield and improving efficiency: compared with conventional nutrient-pot seedling transplanting of cotton, it saves more than 40% of seed, and reduces labor by about 10 worker-days per mu for seedling raising and transplanting. In other words, every 100 seeds can produce more than 40 additional seedlings; now farmers can plant four to five mu of land with each dan of seedlings, and the transplanted area is dozens of times that of cotton seedlings raised in nutrient pots.