Bamboo grows in the mountains, rice grows in water, originally eight poles can't hit, who would have thought that they are close relatives, are grasses, all have 12 pairs of chromosomes, through hybridization can produce offspring, get a new type of crop - bamboo rice.
The father of bamboo rice is the mainland agricultural scientist Zhong Zhangmei, who is the old man on the right in the picture above.
In 1959, Mr. Zhong, who had just arrived at the Shanwei Agricultural Science Institute in Guangdong, found that a bamboo forest in the base suddenly bloomed, and the flower was very similar to the rice flower he was studying.
Mr. Zhong carefully imparted rice pollen to the bamboo, but unfortunately none of the bamboo plants successfully produced seeds with genes common to the two species.
Bamboo flowering is a stress response, which generally takes about 50 years to bloom once, and the entire bamboo forest will die after flowering. This is destined to make it difficult for Mr. Zhong's experiment to have a chance to continue.
Mr. Zhong asked people to inquire around, asked people to pay attention, and told him as soon as there was a bamboo flower. Finally, one day in 1971, a fellow told him that there was a mountain deep in the mountains where the green skin bamboos were blooming, and Mr. Zhong already had a family at this time, so he brought his wife and children to mobilize friends to hold a wedding for rice and bamboo.
Because of the large scale of this experiment, three precious seeds were finally obtained as desired, and then carefully cultivated with them as the mother parent, and the first batch of 137 bamboo rice grains were produced.
However, when Mr. Zhong excitedly took it to eat, he found that the existing seeds were delicious, soft and glutinous and sweet, while some seeds were very hard and tasted like coarse bran. Mr. Zhong thought about it, it should be that some seeds inherit a little more genes from bamboo, and some inherit a little more genes from rice, which is the result.
Mr. Zhong did not give up the two seeds, and cultivated different varieties respectively. Soft and glutinous sweet developed into fragrant rice, the poor taste of this is specially provided to diabetic patients, so now there are many varieties of bamboo rice, for decades, Mr. Zhong selected and bred "Zhu Dao 966" and "Zhu Dao 989" two new strains of bamboo rice.
The price of different varieties is different, this kind of bamboo rice for diabetics can be sold for dozens of yuan a catty, and the ordinary one is sold for about 10 yuan.
At present, bamboo rice has been popularized in major grain-producing bases in the mainland.
Its rice is rich in bamboo flavonoids, which have strong antioxidant capacity, and contain protein, calcium, iron, zinc, selenium and other nutrients several times to dozens of times more than ordinary rice. It has become a kind of health food, which has the wonderful effect of anti-aging and blood sugar control.
In 2011, Renhua County, Guangdong Province introduced and began to plant bamboo rice on a trial basis, and the villagers reported that bamboo rice is not easy to lodging, has strong resistance to typhoons, and is very suitable for local planting.
As soon as the news spread, in the second year, the planting scale of Renhua bamboo rice was expanded to more than 2,500 mu, and the average yield per mu was between 800~1,100 catties. Compared with planting ordinary rice, the average income per load of dry grain can be increased by 60 yuan, and the average income per mu can be increased by 400~600 yuan. Soon there are people in Rucheng, Hunan Province at the junction of Renhua, who have successfully introduced seeds, due to the good foundation of Hunan rice fields, the yield per mu is as high as 1466 catties.
Subsequently, Shaoguan, Meizhou, Huizhou, and other places in Guangdong also tried to plant a certain scale of bamboo rice, and all of them achieved success.
In 2022, the main rice producing areas in the southern part of the mainland will suffer from water soaking, and the yield of ordinary rice varieties will be seriously reduced, while the yield of bamboo rice can still reach 1,000 kg/mu, and the income per mu can increase by 2,000 yuan.
In our country, there are many old scientists like Yuan Longping and Zhong Zhangmei, who are selfless and conscientious, and it is because of them that we can protect the table and eat safe food.
Thanks to these loveliest people.
Finally, bamboo rice is not genetically modified food, hybridization is the use of artificial pollination to produce new varieties, and transgenic is the direct extraction of DNA fragments, with physical methods to forcibly merge, the safety of the two is not the same.