Academician Yin Feihu: Write the paper into the hearts of farmers

Text | "China Science News" reporter Yuan Yixue

From Shihezi in Xinjiang to Hailar in Inner Mongolia, and then to Beijing, and then to Changsha, Hunan, and from there back to Xinjiang, this is the itinerary of Yin Feihu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a researcher at the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural and Reclamation Sciences, in the past few days. 70-year-old Yin Feihu has long been accustomed to such long-distance travel. He cooperated with 16 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the country to set up experimental demonstration bases, hoping to increase farmers' incomes through science and technology to empower agriculture, so that more people can return to agriculture and jointly protect the mainland's food security.

Since engaging in scientific research in 1976, Yin Feihu has taken the lead in developing the integrated technology of drip irrigation and water and fertilizer and the prevention and control technology of soil secondary salinization under drip irrigation conditions in arid areas in China, and has created a technical model for the integrated and efficient utilization of water and fertilizer for major field crops in different regions and standardized production field management technical regulations. Yin Feihu has won many national and provincial awards, but in the face of honors and achievements, he said: "Satisfying farmers is my biggest goal and motivation to move forward." ”

Yin Feihu inspected the operation of intelligent equipment. Photo courtesy of the interviewee

Go where the Motherland needs it most

In 1972, Yin Feihu went to Xinjiang from his hometown in Hunan. According to the conditions at that time, he could go to the government and schools for employment, but he resolutely chose to go to the agricultural company.

"I was born in the countryside, the son of a farmer, and at the age of 5, I started planting rice and pulling weeds. Yin Feihu told China Science Daily. From Hunan to Xinjiang, there are differences in environment and diet. "If you have a job and a goal, you don't feel bitter." He said.

Agricultural production in Xinjiang is a difficult task. Xinjiang's drought and lack of water, coupled with the abundance of saline-alkali land, make farming even more difficult. In order to wake up the sleeping cultivated land, the locals have resorted to methods such as water-dry crop rotation.

Yin Feihu, who first arrived in Xinjiang, is mainly engaged in rice cultivation research. "By planting rice, you can reduce the salinity in the saline land, and the next year you can grow wheat, maize, cotton and other xerophytes on the same plot. Aquatic crops are planted alternately with xerophytic crops, which is called water-to-drought rotation. He explained. While this farming practice can alleviate the effects of salinity on crops, rice cultivation stretches the already scarce water resources even harder.

Reducing "salt" also requires water conservation. Therefore, Yin Feihu participated in the work of rice washing and salt reduction, and carried out water-saving research at the same time.

Do the research that the motherland needs most

In the 60s of the last century, arid and rainless Israel was the first in the world to build a modern drip irrigation system, making this country with 70% of the country's desert area into an agricultural powerhouse. At that time, although the mainland wanted to introduce a drip irrigation system, it was hindered by the high cost of 4,000 yuan per mu.

As a result, Yin Feihu decided to change his research direction and took the initiative to challenge drip irrigation technology. However, he soon realized that drip irrigation can achieve the purpose of saving water, but in order to promote the growth of crops and achieve high yields, it is inseparable from the cooperation of fertilizer, and the integration of water and fertilizer is imperative.

The premise of the integration of water and fertilizer is that the fertilizer is highly soluble in water, because eventually the water and fertilizer will drip into the field through the drip hole with a diameter of no more than 2 mm, and then be absorbed and used by the crops. Among the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertilizers commonly used in agriculture, nitrogen fertilizers and potassium fertilizers can be completely integrated with water, but phosphate fertilizers are not, and insoluble phosphorus and impurities will block the drip holes and affect the effect of irrigation and fertilization.

In order to solve this problem, Yin Feihu bought thousands of yuan of professional books out of his own pocket, learned the knowledge of inorganic salt chemical industry from scratch, and went to Yunnan, Guichuan and other places with relatively rich phosphorus resources to find a way to solve it. His goal was to develop a water-soluble, low-cost phosphate fertilizer suitable for drip irrigation of a wide range of crops.

Generally speaking, phosphate fertilizers are usually prepared by a low-cost wet process, but the phosphate fertilizers produced in this way have a high content of impurities, and a large amount of phosphogypsum will be produced during the preparation process, which will cause pollution to the environment. Another production process is thermal preparation, which can produce yellow phosphorus with high purity and few impurities. Yellow phosphorus is very flammable in the air to form phosphorus pentoxide gas, and then reuse water circulation and absorption to obtain phosphorus products that meet the standards. However, this method is more costly, generally used in the production of medicines, and produces 30% of the by-product - poor sludge phosphorus, which is still not friendly to the environment.

How can you achieve high-purity phosphorus while reducing by-product yield and reducing costs? Yin Feihu came up with the idea of repurifying the by-products and refining high-purity phosphorus from them.

After 4 years and several tests, Yin Feihu led the team to innovate the mud phosphorus recovery method, with a recovery rate of more than 95%, which not only solved the problem of environmental pollution, but also greatly reduced the production cost. Finally, a highly water-soluble compound fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and trace elements required by crops was developed. With the drip irrigation system, the cost per mu can be saved by about 30% and the yield can be increased by more than 30%, which strongly supports the rapid development of drip irrigation and water saving in Xinjiang.

At the same time, in view of the problems such as the rise of salinity in the soil cultivated layer caused by the traditional drip irrigation technology, Yin Feihu's team created a collaborative prevention and control technology for soil salinization irrigation and drainage in drip irrigation farmland, and formulated corresponding technical specifications. Researchers have not only widely applied it to Xinjiang, but also established modern agricultural demonstration areas with the integration of drip irrigation, water and fertilizer as the core in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Angola.

The farmer said that good is really good

Yin Feihu studied with Yuan Longping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in the late 70s of the last century, and engaged in research on the utilization of rice heterosis. "At that time in Hainan, we worked in the fields during the day and listened to Yuan Lao give us lessons at night."

He still remembers Yuan Longping's frequent verbal sentence - "No matter what you do, you must do it yourself". This sentence had a profound impact on Yin Feihu. He believes that to engage in agricultural research, it is necessary to have the spirit of "never knowing this matter and doing it".

"It's not advisable to just fiddle with bottles and cans in the lab and publish a few papers and think that a technology has succeeded." Yin Feihu said, "Now some people have a misunderstanding of innovation. Innovation should not only stay in the paper, but should go through the laboratory, pilot test, and finally realize industrialization. These three steps are indispensable for real innovation, because practice is the only criterion for testing truth. ”

"Experts who can't find problems in the field are not qualified. Farmers want experts to solve practical problems, not to talk about theories in the field. Only those who find and solve problems in the field can be called agricultural experts. Yin Feihu passed on the importance of practice to the students. His students often start to intervene in the design of the test field, follow the construction, and continue to experiment on the test field after it is completed.

"Only by doing it in person can we increase our perceptual understanding of books and make new discoveries; Only when problems are discovered in practice can they be truly solved. He explained.

Yin Feihu has been polishing his research in practice. After solving the problem of drip irrigation in the water-scarce areas of the north, he faced the needs of the southern region and worked with relevant experts to solve the problem of the size of fruit trees. The yield of fruit trees is very high for a year or several years, and then the yield begins to decrease or even fail, and then a year or several years after entering a high yield period, which is the phenomenon of large and small years. "This happens because the soil is not fertile enough or there is an imbalance in nutrients. We have found the nutrients that the soil lacks through research, and we have completely solved this problem by supplementing them with targeted supplementation through drip irrigation systems. Yin Feihu said.

At present, Yin Feihu's team mainly conducts research in three aspects: agricultural water conservation and water and fertilizer integration, saline-alkali land improvement, and irrigation and fertilization automation. "In fact, my research revolves around one thing, which is to improve farmers' income and happiness. Only when the land is really successful and the demonstration area is established, can farmers believe and follow along, and rural revitalization can be truly realized. ”