Southeast Asia Information Port News (www.dnyxxg.com) – “The successful cultivation of a high-quality seed brings smiles to farmers’ faces, confidence in food security, and an increase in the value of the industrial chain. Every carefully cultivated seed nurtures a hopeful future,” said Zhang Liyi, a representative to the Guizhou Provincial People’s Congress and director of the Dryland Grain Research Institute of the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, in response to a question from a China News Service reporter on the “Representative Channel” on the 29th. He added, “We will continue to deepen basic research, strive to break through core seed technology, and focus on cultivating more breakthrough varieties; we will remove obstacles to the integration of production, education, research, and application, accelerate the implementation of scientific and technological achievements, and contribute our due strength to filling China’s rice bowl with Chinese grain.”
“A seed is like a ‘chip’ for agriculture. Though small in size, it carries immense weight, determining not only the quality of rice in people’s bowls but also the bottom line of national food security,” Zhang Liyi said. He added that traditional breeding methods have reached their limits. "To secure China's food supply, the key lies in firmly grasping our core varieties. This requires relying on technological innovation, breaking through 'bottleneck' technologies, and cultivating more high-yield, high-quality, stress-resistant, and high-efficiency 'superior varieties of the era.'"
"Ultimately, competition in the seed industry is competition in science and technology." The Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Dryland Grain Research Institute has always been at the forefront of seed industry innovation, continuously promoting the iterative upgrading of breeding technologies: from conventional hybridization breeding, mutation breeding, and haploid breeding to molecular design breeding, all are using technological breakthroughs to accelerate the process of new variety selection.
To date, the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Dryland Grain Research Institute has bred more than 120 superior new varieties of corn, wheat, and sorghum for brewing, which have been promoted to more than 10 provinces in China. By 2025, a number of independently bred new varieties, represented by "Kangnongyu 8009," will have been promoted on nearly 10 million mu (approximately 667,000 hectares) within and outside Guizhou Province, demonstrating the value of agricultural "chips" with practical results and further consolidating the foundation of grain production in Guizhou Province. The Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Dryland Grain Research Institute, in collaboration with enterprises, completed the world's first end-to-end genome assembly of the liquor-grade sorghum "Hongyingzi," and independently developed two high-throughput breeding "chips," contributing to enhancing China's independent innovation capabilities in sorghum breeding.
"China's rice bowl" needs both grain and vegetables. Meng Pinghong, a member of the Guizhou Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and vice president of the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and her team, leveraging Guizhou's mountainous resources, used science and technology as a "golden key" to unlock the "happiness door" of rural revitalization, promoting the transformation of Guizhou's vegetable production from a single season to multiple seasons, from a fixed season to off-season, and from "traditional planting" to "high-efficiency agriculture."
Several years ago, Meng Pinghong led her team to promote new vegetable varieties and technologies in mountainous areas, where previously only one season of vegetables and one season of rice were grown annually. The team went into villages and households, guiding farmers to change varieties and practice intercropping, upgrading the traditional planting model to a high-efficiency model of "vegetable-rice-vegetable" with three seasons and four harvests per year, increasing the annual output value per mu from 5,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan. Farmers exclaimed, "These aren't just vegetables; they're our children's tuition fees, the bricks and tiles for our new houses!"
"The modernization of agriculture in Guizhou means using modern technology to adapt to and revitalize the mountainous terrain, turning 'local specialties' into 'major industries,' and transforming green mountains and clear waters into gold and silver mountains," said Meng Pinghong. She noted that in the past five years, the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences has bred over 300 new crop varieties, with a planting area of 50 million mu (approximately 3.3 million hectares). Taking chili peppers as an example, a single seed supports a major industry with an annual output value of 28.8 billion yuan, boosting the income of 1.4 million farmers.
Small vegetables, big impact on people's livelihoods. Guizhou has become an important base for the "southern vegetables to the north" and "western vegetables to the east" transportation of vegetables to China, as well as a significant vegetable supply base for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Meng Pinghong suggested strengthening top-level design and overall planning, implementing the "Seed Industry Revitalization Project" and the "Agricultural Machinery and Agronomy Integration Project," to transform Guizhou's mountains into a "green bank" full of hope.
The Guizhou Provincial Government Work Report states that in 2026, Guizhou will continue to prioritize grain production and further implement the action plan to enhance grain production capacity. Simultaneously, it will continuously improve the quality and efficiency of agriculture through measures such as focusing on improving the supply of major agricultural products and developing distinctive and advantageous agricultural industries tailored to local conditions. (End)
