Photo: Screenshot of the demonstration site of perennial rice in Menghai, Southwest China's Yunnan Province from Yunnan University's official Wechat account

A research team from the Yunnan University in Southwest China's Yunnan Province has successfully bred perennial rice (PR), which can produce high yields over two to four consecutive years with a single planting, according to a report published by the team in the Journal of Nature Sustainability, the university's official WeChat announced on Tuesday.  

The report noted that perennial cultivars are strongly preferred by farmers as growing them saves 58.1 percent of labor and 49.2 percent of input costs in each growth cycle.

Crop perennialization, the conversion of annual grains to perennial forms, has showed a possibility to intensify sustainability, increase crop productivity, farming income and soil health using fewer resources. 

The PR 23, released to farmers in China in 2018, marks a key milestone in the commercialization of perennial grains bred via interspecific hybridization.

Three recently released cultivars of PR that the team bred including PR23, PR25 and PR107 can produce high yields over two to four consecutive years for each of four to 10 cycles of growth-harvest-regrowth on plants from a single planting, representing a step change that makes ratooning an economically attractive option for irrigated production environments that are not limited in duration by cold weather or other adverse environmental conditions, per the report. 

The cultivation of PR, after more than 20 years of efforts, represents a cropping system that simultaneously achieves grain production, labor reduction and ecological security, especially for terraced and fragile farmland, according to the report. PR has demonstrated good yield potential, and agronomic traits for four years and eight cropping seasons from a single planting, which can enhance soil fertility and reduce requirements for inputs through ecological intensification with simplified management.  

The field yield testing for a new high-quality salt-tolerant rice strain "Yanhuangxiangjing," cultivated by a research team from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was completed in October, in Dongying in East China's Shandong Province, with an output of 505.1 kilograms  per mu (0.06 hectares). 


Global Times