China rolling out machines to help hybrid rice production

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Sorting and sowing machines adopted to assist hybrid rice plantation on China's undulating hill-formed farmlands are entering the industrial phase, Tang Wenbang, a professor from Hunan Agricultural University announced at a recent symposium.

Tang revealed the development to more than 30 agriculturists attending the symposium in Changsha, capital of Hunan province on Sept 22. The workshop focused on frontier crop-growing sciences.

To address the conundrum leading to labor-intensive farming on land separated by numerous hills, the new small-size machines can identify seeds before sorting them completely with great accuracy. In this way, seed wastage will be cut to less than 1% and productive efficiency will be raised by 36.3%.

"Those machines, adapted to different geographic conditions and scale of production, can provide solutions to long-existing technological problems on how to industrialize hybrid rice production at a much lower cost in terms of the use of seeds," Professor Tang said.

The symposium, coinciding with the Third Chinese Farmers' Harvest Festival established in 2018 to mark the Fall equinox under the Chinese Lunar Calendar, also received a congratulatory letter from Yuan Longping, the forerunner and top engineer of the country's hybrid-rice sciences.

"The development of crop sciences should be highly relevant to crop production and today's symposium well demonstrates this relationship," Yuan wrote.

Content in partnership with Science and Technology Daily


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