The TV series "Meritorious Service" is currently airing, which is based on the true stories of the first 8 recipients of the "Order of the Republic" and connects their colorful chapters in the form of a unit drama. Among them, the "Yuan Longping's Dream" unit, as the "last stick" of the series of TV series "Meritorious Service", tells the story of Yuan Longping's unremitting exploration and struggle for decades to solve the problem of food and clothing for the Chinese people and even the people of the world.
In the episode broadcast last night, a detail made many netizens shout directly: "Break the defense"! In the film, on the occasion of his death, Xiang Guanghan and Yuan Longping said that they hoped to eat rice. In order to meet the wishes of the old man, Yuan Longping ran around. But due to the lack of supplies, he traveled all over the village without finding a bowl of rice. After Xiang Guanghan's death, Yuan Longping buried a grain of rice in the soil in front of his tomb, and he felt that as an intellectual who studied agriculture, he owed the world a bowl of rice, and secretly swore that he must find a good seed. In a trance, he seemed to have a dream, in which he saw the golden rice field that he had imagined, "Rice grows taller than sorghum, ears are longer than broomsticks, and grains are as big as peanuts and rice, and they can be full when you look at them." My colleague and I sat under that ear of rice to cool off..."
Today, Yuan Longping's dream is becoming a reality step by step.
The "Dream of Cooling Under the Grass" is about to come true
In August this year, 15 acres of "giant rice" were successfully planted in Changhong Village, Shiwan Town, Dazu District, Chongqing. This batch of "giant rice" is twice as tall as conventional rice, with an average of 2 meters per plant. "Giant rice" not only has a thick and straight rice stalk, but also resistant to flooding, salt and alkali, but also to bring sufficient nutrition to the plant, providing the best habitat for aquatic products and mammals to shade and shade. At the same time, the rice field where the "giant rice" is located can store deeper water, which is conducive to the development of the "rice-fish symbiosis" project and helps farmers achieve increased production and income.
"We have carefully counted that a giant rice plant has a minimum of 360 ears of rice, while ordinary rice has only 250 grains." Chen Yangpu, a researcher, introduced that the production capacity of "giant rice" per mu reached 1600 jin. Experts revealed that it is still in the experimental stage, next year after taking another year of data, will submit seeds for approval, after the approval is equivalent to obtaining an "identity card", and then will be planted in a large area. In the past, the height of rice usually did not exceed the height of people's legs, and the higher ones were generally below the waist of people, and farmers had to bend down to harvest. In the future, after the promotion of the planting of two-meter-high giant rice, the rice ears will hang down just the height of normal adults, and farmers will no longer have to bend over to harvest rice in the future.
In addition to the emergence of higher rice, yuan longping's development of hybrid rice yield per mu has also made a new breakthrough. According to Xinhua News Agency reported on October 17, in Qingzhu Village, Hengnan County, Hengyang City, Hunan Province, the hybrid rice double-cropping mu yield developed by the expert team of academician Yuan Longping broke through the 1500 kg mark last year, and the hybrid rice double-cropping mu yield reached 1603.9 kg.
"The same ecological region has produced more than 1,500 kilograms per mu for two consecutive years, which means that the goal proposed by Academician Yuan Longping before his death has been achieved." Li Jianwu, director of the Cultivation Physiology and Ecology Department of the Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Center at the production measurement site, said that under the extreme weather of continuous high temperature in the early stage, the high yield results were not easy to come by, indicating that the variety has strong adaptability and lays a good foundation for the next step of promotion.
In addition to hybrid rice, Yuan Longping also invented seawater rice grown on saline and alkaline land. At the sub-forum of the first session of the Boao Forum for Asia Economic Development and Safety Forum held in Changsha on October 19, Zhao Bingran, a disciple of Yuan Longping and a researcher at the National Hybrid Rice Engineering and Technology Research Center, said that this year's salinity-tolerant hybrid rice demonstration has made phased progress.
Zhao Bingran provided a set of latest data when sharing: in 2021, the yield of salt-tolerant rice per mu in Xing'an League in Inner Mongolia, Kashgar in Xinjiang, Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, Yuepu Lake in Xinjiang, Midong in Xinjiang, Rudong in Jiangsu and Jiangmen in Guangdong reached 537.5 kg, 575.3 kg, 806.66 kg, 595.2 kg, 659.3 kg, 732 kg and 501.2 kg respectively.
Planting rice in more saline and alkali land and achieving high yield and high efficiency is one of the dreams of Academician Yuan Longping. This technology can not only improve the ecological environment of saline-alkali land, but also double the income of growers. China alone has 400 million mu to 600 million mu of saline land, and if 200 million mu to 300 million mu of saline land can be solved to grow rice, Xinjiang will become the second Chinese granary after the northeast. "Teacher Yuan has always dreamed of taking ultra-high yield as the most critical measure and goal to ensure food security, filling the rice bowl of the Chinese people and benefiting the people of the world." Adhering to The Legacy of Teacher Yuan, we will strive to achieve the goal of developing 100 million mu of saline-tolerant rice, yielding more than 300 kg per mu, increasing grain by 30 billion kg per year, and feeding an additional population of 100 million people within 8 to 10 years, so as to make new contributions to food security in China and even the world. Zhao Bingran said.
Yuan Longping (first from right) and Li Bihu (third from right), a member of the scientific research team, conduct research in the experimental field of Anjiang Agricultural School.
Hybrid rice covers the whole world
At the 2018 Future Scientist Awards Ceremony, the 88-year-old Yuan Longping spoke fondly about his two dreams. In addition to the "dream of cooling under the grass", he also has another dream of "hybrid rice covering the world".
Yuan Longping once said that there are 160 million hectares of rice fields in the world, and if half of them are hybrid rice, if each hectare can increase production by two tons, it can produce an additional 160 million tons of grain, which can feed an additional 400 to 500 million people. In fact, hybrid rice has been promoted and introduced to dozens of countries and regions around the world, and the overseas planting area has reached 7 million hectares, making great contributions to world food security.
In August 2017, The Director General of Madagascar in Africa, Sahuri, came to Changsha, Hunan Province, to visit Yuan Longping and bring Yuan Longping a special gift, a new version of Madagascar dollars with a face value of 20,000 Ariary. On Malaysia's largest denomination currency is a hybrid rice plant of Yuan Longping to commemorate Yuan Longping's contribution to solving the country's hunger problem.
In 2006, Yuan Longping aided the construction of the Malagasy Hybrid Rice Demonstration Center, determined to fully promote hybrid rice. However, when the team came to the African island country, they found that they had to face many technical problems that they had not thought of before. For example, madagascar has a frog that does not eat pests but loves rice; for example, the country's chameleon likes to crawl on mature rice fields, thus overwhelming large rice fields and causing yield losses... There are many similar problems, and Yuan Longping's team has tackled them problem by problem, teaching local farmers to plant by hand. What used to be 2.5 tons per hectare was nearly tripled by the team to 7 tons per hectare. In 2017, Madagascar was hit by a flood, and the country's agricultural experts rowed boats to see rice paddies and found that the local seedlings had all fallen, and only China's hybrid rice was still standing there. Nowadays, when locals mention hybrid rice, they all call it "rubabe", which is the best thing in the local language.
Dubai, located in the Middle East, relies on imports almost all of its food, and has repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to grow rice on its own soil. Hearing that Yuan Longping had developed seawater rice, Dubai took the initiative to ask Yuan Longping's team for help. In 2018, Yuan Longping's team successfully planted seawater rice in the desert of Dubai, with a yield of more than 500 kilograms per mu. Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid was overjoyed and processed the locally produced Seawater Rice in Dubai into a beautiful souvenir, named "almarmoom" brand rice as a national gift in Dubai, and was only given to the most respected guests. This has also become a symbol of fruitful results and friendship between China and Arab countries in agricultural science and technology cooperation under the framework of the "Belt and Road".
Yuan Longping once cultivated 17 and a half pounds of sweet potatoes
"Yuan Longping's dreams, or his ideals in this life, come from his childhood. At that time, they were in Chongqing, and the scene of suffering brought by war and hunger to mankind was engraved in his heart. In the process of fleeing, he saw farmers risking bomb explosions and planting seedlings in paddy fields in order not to miss the time of farming. Because his mother once said to him: 'People are mistaken for a moment, and people are wrong for a year'. "Meritorious Service" director Yan Jiangang introduced in an interview. Before the shooting, the production team had paid a special visit to Yuan Longping. When he saw the actor who was about to play himself, Yuan Longping said humbly: "What do I have to shoot?" My life was very uneventful. ”
The film also introduces the unknown side of Yuan Longping. For example, when many people knew the name Yuan Longping, he was already the father of hybrid rice, but what did he do before studying hybrid rice?
It is reported that Yuan Longping was the first batch of college students trained in New China, and after graduating from the Southwest Agricultural College in 1953, he obeyed the assignment and began to work at the Anjiang Agricultural School. Before studying rice, he mainly studied sweet potatoes. At the National Farmer Breeding Experts On-site Conference held in 1960, a large sweet potato weighing 17 and a half kilograms and a starch content of 26.7% was cultivated, which made many farmers know Yuan Longping, a young teacher at Anjiang Agricultural School. From studying sweet potatoes to studying rice, 1960 was a crucial turning point for Yuan Lao. Teacher Jin nodded to Yuan Longping, "The experiments you are doing now on sweet potatoes and tomatoes, the future results I have expected, only quantitative change has no qualitative change, and the results of asexual hybridization cannot be inherited through seeds." Realizing that rice is one of the main food crops in China and the primary food crop in the south, Yuan Longping changed his goal from studying sweet potatoes to rice from 1960.
In addition, the film also reproduces the details of Yuan Longping's use of warm water bottle stoppers to relieve dermatitis. It is reported that due to long-term research in the rice field, Yuan Longping suffers from dermatitis and is often itchy. Every night, Elder Yuan needs to use the cork of the warm water bottle to burn himself again, otherwise he will itch and can't sleep. Because of this, he could not spend the night anywhere, because he could not stand it. But he will be better in Hainan and Hunan, after all, he has been staying for a long time.
Source: Xinhua News Agency, China Youth Daily, The Paper, China News Network, etc
Column Editor-in-Chief: Liu Lu Text Editor: Lu Xiaochuan Caption Source: ic photo Image Editor: Shao Jing
Source: Author: Shangguan He