University agronomists breed perennial rice

Together with his team members, Hu Fengyi, an agronomist at Yunnan University, has created a perennial rice by hybridizing perennial wild seeds with annual seeds. They have put the novel strain into market.

Hu’s scientific results over the past 20 years are recorded in the paper Sustained Productivity and Agronomic Potential of Perennial Rice in the journal Nature Sustainability, as well as in a report titled Sustainable Agriculture through Perennial Grains: Wheat, Rice, Maize, and Other Species.

My perennial rice can be consecutively harvested for many years after being sown once, and it also improves soil and increases organic matter and nitrogen, said Hu.

Compared with annual rices, the perennial rice does not need to repeat the production process of buying seeds, raising seedlings, plowing, harrowing and planting. This helps to save labor and production cost.

Source: Xinhua; trans-editing by Guo Yao