A Chinese agricultural scientist claims to have set a new world record by producing an annual yield of 1,537.78 kilograms of hybrid rice per mu (about 0.07 hectares) in south China's Guangdong province.
The amount of the double-cropping rice is equal to that produced over three seasons in the past, marking a big breakthrough,Luo Xiwen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering said.
A hybrid rice project headed by Yuan Longping, known as "the father of hybrid rice", has achieved an annual yield of 1,537.78 kilogram of rice per mu (about 0.07 hectares), state-run Xinhua news agency quoted local officials in Xingning City, as saying.
"This is the fifth generation of hybrid rice technology," Yuan said.
"The quality of the rice is as good as Japan's renowned Koshihikari rice."
The project was launched in 2015.
Yuan began theoretical research about 50 years ago and continued to set new records in the average yields of hybrid rice plots.
China's Ministry of Agriculture officially launched a hybrid rice breeding programme in 1996.
Four years later, a first-phase target of 10.5 tonnes per hectare was achieved by Yuan's research team. The fourth-phase target of 15.4 tonnes per hectare was reached in 2014.
About 65 per cent of Chinese depend on rice as a staple food. In 2013 Yuan had criticised an Indian farmer Sumant Kumar who beat his world record by harvesting 22.4 tonnes per hectare saying it as fake.
It is "120 per cent fake",Yuan said afterKumar's success story published by the British newspaper Guardian which carried a feature on the achievement of young farmer from Nalanda district of Bihar in 2012 by using a method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI).
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