Breeding of new super rice varieties helps stabilize grain production, increase output and efficiency
In recent years, China's rice breeding experts have, through scientific and technological innovation, successfully bred a large number of high-quality, multi-resistant super rice varieties and achieved large-scale promotion, powerfully safeguarding China's grain production security. For the single variety Longjing 31 alone, as of now, it has been promoted cumulatively over 52.485 million mu, making it the rice variety with the largest annual planting area in China over the past 15 years, with a total increase in rice output of 3.58 billion kg and newly added economic benefits reaching 10.02 billion yuan.
As is well known, compared with other rice, super rice has characteristics such as high yield, high quality, multi-resistance and wide adaptability. For many years, super rice has provided important support on issues crucial to basic human survival, such as safeguarding national grain security and addressing world famine. However, the contradiction between high yield and the incompatibility of high quality and disease resistance in super rice has not only long restricted the development of the rice industry, but has also become a difficult, focal and hot issue that rice breeders are striving to overcome.
For many years, with the support of the national rice industry technology system and industry experts, China's new super rice varieties have continuously achieved technological innovation and breakthroughs. In particular, the super rice breeding project established in 2014 - "Integration and Demonstration of Efficient Breeding Technology for Target Yield in Key Regions of China Super Rice" - has now successfully achieved new results in super rice breeding that coordinates high yield with high quality and disease resistance.
According to reports, this industry special project was jointly participated in by the China National Rice Research Institute and the Sichuan Neijiang Hybrid Rice Science and Technology Development Research Center. In response to the contradiction between high yield and the incompatibility of high quality and disease resistance in China's hybrid rice, rice experts, through the exploration, identification and study of germplasm resources, creatively used restorer lines with low-latitude, high-altitude Yunnan plateau japonica rice bloodlines as sterile cytoplasm donors, and bred multiple new cytoplasmic male sterile lines with outstanding target traits and excellent comprehensive traits. The newly combined super rice varieties coordinated the contradiction between high yield and high quality and disease resistance, and have been widely applied in China's southern rice regions.
At the same time, experts on the industry special project also applied the parent selection and matching method for super hybrid rice breeding and the early-generation identification, screening and evaluation technology for rice quality, and cultivated a batch of Neixiang series new hybrid rice combinations organically combining "high quality, high yield, disease resistance and wide adaptability", with 37 new hybrid rice varieties bred through combination passing national or provincial approval 48 times. It is understood that statistics on the Neixiang series combinations participating in national and provincial regional trials from 2003 to 2014 show that this series of combinations, whether in yield, quality or disease resistance, all showed significant improvements over the control, better solving the difficult problems of high yield coexisting with poor appearance quality and cooking and eating quality of rice, as well as disease resistance.
Good varieties also need supporting integrated technologies. It is understood that for the new varieties bred from the results of this industry special project, through research on high-yield, high-efficiency cultivation techniques and high-yield seed production and propagation techniques, a technical core has been formed consisting of precision sowing, cultivation of strong seedlings, wide-row sparse planting, quantitative seedling control, precise fertilization and integrated control, improving fertilizer utilization rate and production efficiency, reducing environmental pollution, raising production benefits, and powerfully promoting the transformation and application of results. According to statistics, as of 2014, plateau japonica-type Neixiangyou series hybrid rice varieties have been promoted cumulatively over 141 million mu, among which varieties bred from the results themselves have been promoted cumulatively over 83 million mu, with an increase in rice output of 2.34 billion kg and newly added social and economic benefits of 4.927 billion yuan. For the male sterile lines bred using these results, 13 units (individuals) including the Rice and Sorghum Research Institute of the Sichuan Academy of Agricultural Sciences collectively bred 10 combinations through combination, passing provincial-level or higher approval 11 times. Reporter Wu Pei