How can the sugarcane industry's problems be solved? The Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences' improved variety breeding provides the answer
Recently, the Sugarcane Center of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences established a research workstation in Gengma County, Yunnan Province, aiming to promote the development of the local sugarcane planting industry through scientific and technological means. This is also a new measure by the academy to strengthen academy-local cooperation and actively advance the integration of "production, learning and research."
For a long time, due to reasons such as an unreasonable variety structure, backward planting techniques and poor production conditions, China's sugarcane yield per unit area has been low and benefits have been low, with sugarcane yield per unit area hovering at around 4.2 tons. In recent years, affected by continuously rising production costs and persistently sluggish sugar prices, sugarcane planting has reached the edge of profit and loss, and improving the quality and efficiency of the sugarcane industry has reached a critical point where it must be done.
Researcher Yang Benpeng, head of the Sugarcane Center of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, believes that at present China's sugarcane planting basically uses sugarcane tops as seed, and the spread of pathogens, declines in yield and sugar content, and the difficulty of unified seed supply have become bottlenecks constraining the development of the sugarcane industry. Virus-free healthy sugarcane seedlings overcome the shortcomings of traditional seedlings, are the most effective measure to replace sugarcane top seedlings and increase yield per unit area and sugar content, and are an important foundation for improving the quality and efficiency of the sugarcane industry.
"We began researching improved sugarcane variety breeding technology in 2001. After more than 10 years of tackling key problems, the comprehensive virus-free healthy sugarcane seedling technology we developed can increase yield per unit area by more than 20%, increase sucrose content by 0.5 to 1 percentage point, and at the same time save 60% of seed use," said Yang Benpeng. The academy has made breakthroughs in multiple key technologies including factory-based seedling cultivation, large-scale transplanting and temporary planting, field propagation, multiplex pathogen PCR detection and supporting cultivation for production, effectively solving the problem of sugarcane variety degradation and extending the service life of fine varieties.
According to reports, in recent years the academy has laid out its innovation chain around the sugarcane industry chain, integrated scientific research forces inside and outside the academy, and successively formed 7 research and development teams for collaborative innovation and joint efforts. It has built a standardized cultivation technology system suitable for mechanical tillage and harvesting, and initially developed agronomic technology compatible with farming machinery, forming a comprehensive virus-free sugarcane seedling technology including seedlings and planting methods, and achieving an effective connection between sugarcane scientific research, the industrial technology system and industrial development.
At present, the Sugarcane Center of the academy has carried out comprehensive technology demonstration and promotion in Hainan, Guangxi, Yunnan and other places. Over 7 years, virus-free healthy sugarcane seedlings from the academy have been promoted and applied cumulatively on more than 900,000 mu, with an average yield increase of 2 tons per mu and an increase in net income for sugarcane farmers of more than 700 yuan per mu. Virus-free healthy seedlings became an instant hit among sugarcane farmers. During promotion in Fusui County, Chongzuo City, Guangxi Autonomous Region, many nearby farmers drove ox carts and rushed to the demonstration base to haul seedlings. Unable to wait for the base workers to cut and harvest the sugarcane seedlings, they took action themselves one after another, cutting the seedlings in the fields and carrying them armful by armful into their own carts.
"We do not study sugarcane merely by staying with a single technology; we pay more attention to building a technology system and to comprehensive technology for the healthy development of the sugarcane industry," Yang Benpeng told reporters. As research deepens, the team members' divisions of labor are also continuously becoming more refined: Researcher Zhang Shuzhen has carried out molecular biology and transgenic sugarcane research, seizing the frontier technology of world sugarcane research; Researcher Li Ming is stepping up research and development of sugarcane farming machinery to solve the problems of excessively high labor costs and high labor intensity in sugarcane production; Researcher Li Jihua extracts nanocellulose from discarded sugarcane bagasse after sugar pressing, then makes it into masks, packaging materials and so on, seeking benefits from deep processing of sugarcane...
"Modernization and practicality are the keywords for developing the sugarcane industry." Wang Qinghuang, president of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, said that next the academy will grasp key technologies such as healthy improved varieties, scientific planting, irrigation and water conservancy, mechanized farming, large-scale production and contractual management to organize efforts and strive to build a modern sugarcane industry. At the same time, it will do a good job in "research-demonstration-promotion" work so that science and technology take root in the production development of thousands of households. (Lin Chuan, reporter Deng Weizhe)