17 years of rice breeding, Zhu Banghui has achieved abundant results

In April, Zhu Banghui had just returned to Changzhou from Hainan, and he was busy again.

Zhu Banghui, 42 years old this year, is the deputy director of the Jiangsu (Wujin) Rice Research Institute and has been engaged in rice genetic breeding for 17 years.

Domestic rice breeding basically uses Hainan as a southern multiplication base. Every November, as soon as the rice in Changzhou is harvested and the breeding data is sorted out, Zhu Banghui immediately flies to the breeding base in Hainan, and sometimes he cannot even return for the Spring Festival; every April, when rice seedling cultivation begins in Changzhou, he hurries back. Spending half the year in Hainan and half the year in Changzhou is his daily working state, and this state has not lasted just one or two years, but many years in a row.

For a variety, from selection and breeding to development and passing approval, going through ten or eight years is very normal, and there is no room for the slightest mistake in between. Whether in Changzhou or at the southern multiplication base, he spends most of his time in the rice fields: every day he walks through the fields holding a record book, recording the characteristics and traits of intermediate breeding materials, preparing for cross combinations and seed selection and collection. The rice growing season is exactly the period of the year in Changzhou with high temperatures and high humidity. After one round in the fields, clothes get wet and then dry, dry and then wet again, and that is nothing; as for mosquito bites, it is simply routine.

In Zhu Banghui's hands, one excellent rice variety after another stood out. Since starting work, Zhu Banghui has bred 11 approved varieties, including late japonica 9707, Wuxiangjing No. 19, Wuyunjing No. 21, Wuyunjing No. 23, and Wuyunjing No. 24. The cumulative promotion area of the varieties has exceeded 60 million mu, increasing social and economic benefits by about 5 billion yuan. Among them, Wuyunjing No. 21 broke through the bottleneck that varieties with the "Wu" prefix were not resistant to stripe leaf blight, and in 2009 was awarded a high-tech variety by the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry. Since passing approval, it has always been the main planted variety in the Huaibei region. He also participated in breeding Wuyunjing No. 30, Yinyu 2084, and others. Among them, Wuyunjing No. 30 was the only japonica rice variety to win first prize in the first Jiangsu high-quality rice taste evaluation, and he also bred new varieties such as the soft rice new variety Ruanyu No. 1 and giant embryo rice.

Gold cups and silver cups are not as good as the reputation of ordinary people. Rice breeding is about bringing the best varieties and the most advanced technology to farmers, increasing yield, improving quality, and raising income. While doing a good job in breeding work, Zhu Banghui also actively does agricultural technology promotion and service work in villages and at designated points, helping farmers solve problems in the fields, delivering new varieties and new technologies into villages and households, and effectively improving farmers' ability to farm scientifically.