The increase will be attained by popularizing close-planting techniques on large tracts of fields, said Alim, director of the Xinjiang Regional Department of Agriculture.

To date, close-planting techniques have been applied to 120,000 hectares of cotton fields. The per hectare cotton output on the fields averaged 2,250 kilograms, 750 kilograms higher than output gained from fields cultivated with conventional methods, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Li Shiqing, director of the Xinjiang Regional Agro-technology Center, said, "This is an unparalleled breakthrough in cotton production and is of great significance to agricultural structuring and sustainable development in Xinjiang."

Xinjiang cultivates 990,000 hectares of cotton fields, which turned out 1.5 million tons of cotton last year, accounting for 37 percent of the country's total. But the majority of cotton fields are located in southern Xinjiang, where arable land is limited.

"If the new technique is applied to 330,000 hectares of land and the per hectare yield is raised by 1,000 kilograms, it will be possible for Xinjiang to decrease the size of the cotton fields by 190,000 hectares, which could be converted to raise other crops," Alim said.

With the new technique, farmers plant two cotton seeds in each hole and make the plants bear buds at different heights by pinching the top of each plant at different times. As a result, cotton bolls grow at two levels, letting in sunshine.

The close-planting technique oversteps the conventional cultivation limit of planting 1,100 cottons seeds per mu of the cotton field (a hectare contains 15 mu). Around 2,000 cotton seeds are planted on each mu.

The height of the cotton bolls is controlled for ventilation and infiltration of sunshine for each cotton plant, said Zhang Henian, an expert on close planting.

The record per unit cotton output was recorded in Qira County in southern Xinjiang, where 3,800 kilograms of cotton was harvested per hectare last year.

Aze, a farmer of Uygur ethnic group in Hotan Prefecture, said he used half of his cotton fields to plant apricot trees last year. Yet the cotton output was roughly the same as that in the previous year and he gained 4,000 yuan from the apricots.

(Eastday.com 06/19/2001)