Hainan Experimental Station, Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

In the biological breeding experimental base of the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, a viewing meeting of new technologies and new achievements was held in the field, attracting many experts and entrepreneurs. A10-11 version photo/Beijing News reporter Zhou Huaizong

Researchers from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences observe rice.

Hong Huilong is pollinating.

Millet bred at the Nanfang base.

Sanya Nanbin Farm, where the Hainan Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is located.

After hurriedly finishing lunch, Hong Huilong returned to the soybean field outside the test station, it was nearly the spring equinox, the temperature in Sanya exceeded 30 degrees Celsius, the midday sun shone into the freshly watered field, and the steaming water vapor made the field more stuffy.

Noon is the season of soybean flowering, a flower from flowering to complete pollination, only more than ten minutes, if you can not complete the work of male removal and artificial pollination in more than ten minutes, this time of hybridization, even if it fails.

Not far away, in the rice field, there are people doing the same work, wearing long rain boots and a small bench with pointed legs, sticking the bench into the mud, sitting firmly on the bench, their eyes fixed on the small flowers of rice, waiting for the moment when each flower opens.

From the north to the south, they migrate with seeds

On November 2022, 11, Hong Huilong just finished collecting soybeans from the Shunyi base in Beijing, and hurriedly sent the harvested seeds to Sanya, Hainan, more than 10 kilograms of seeds, and the express fee was 8 yuan per kilogram, which was a big expense. There were also some precious hybrid seeds, which he did not dare to express, he packed them in boxes, dragged them to the capital airport, took them on a plane, and took them all the way to the Hainan Experimental Station of the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Nanbin Farm in Sanya.

Sanya, a well-known tourist destination, many people living in the north, when winter comes, go all the way south, spend the whole winter in warm Sanya, sheltering from the cold wind of the north.

Hong Huilong is not here for vacation, he has to plant the land here for four to five months, and the seeds he brings from Beijing and even further north in Heilongjiang are planted on Sanya land until they are harvested in March and April of the following year, and then returned to the north.

Hainan is China's breeding mecca, and since the middle of the last century, breeding scientists have brought local autumn seeds to Hainan, which is located in the tropics, for breeding and selection. This is Nanfan, a word that is not in the dictionary, and is also called "Nanfengjia Generation", that is, in the breeding process, through the warm winter in the south, the process of adding a generation of seeds to breed.

Breeding is a process of continuous selection, in the generation of seeds, those individuals with excellent traits are selected, constantly hybridized, continue to select, and finally breed a new variety. Every time from seed to seed, it is called a generation, and in the past, the breeding of a variety often required more than ten generations of selection. Therefore, breeders will come to Hainan in winter to breed, so that they can add an additional generation each year.

In the process of southern breeding, the seeds migrate with the breeders, from the native land to Hainan, and then from Hainan to the native area, like migratory birds, on time until the new variety is successfully cultivated.

Southern breeding is an indispensable part of breeding, and in the past, Yuan Longping's hybrid rice, Li Denghai's hybrid corn, and Guo Sandui's insect-resistant cotton were all bred in continuous southern breeding. Nowadays, every November, nearly 11,700 breeders from more than 70 agricultural research institutions across the country arrive in Sanya on time with their seeds. Data show that in the past <> years, more than <>,<> crop varieties have been bred through Nannan, accounting for more than <>% of the improved crop varieties approved by the country. It can be said that on every Chinese's table, there may be food that has experienced southern prosperity.

Nanfang is known as the "breeding accelerator"

Nanfang has been in existence for more than ten years, and it seems that he has never seen winter again.

Hong Huilong is a native of Inner Mongolia, and the winter he remembers has snowy forests, decaying grass, and sunsets. But in Sanya, there is only spring and summer.

Hong Huilong is not from a farming family, until he graduated from a bachelor's degree, he has never really gone to the field, and he has never seen soybeans growing in the ground, and even the appearance of beans is a little blurry, and in his life before college, he saw more tofu, soy milk, bean sprouts, soybean oil and many other soy products.

In 2010, when he graduated from his undergraduate degree, he was recommended by his teacher to intern in the team of Qiu Lijuan, a researcher at the Institute of Composition Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. It was also from that year that he spent every winter in Hainan.

Nanfang is known as the "breeding accelerator", and everyone in this accelerator lives in the dislocation of the seasons, in November, before the onset of winter, they go south to Hainan, working in the scorching sun and heat wave, and in March and April, when they return to their hometowns, winter has passed.

On farms in Sanya, time is always driving people to work busily.

Planting in November, then watering and hoeing, unlike field planting, breeding materials vary widely, each material, there may be only a few plants, it is impossible to use machine work, all the work depends on labor. Breeding scientists and students cannot do all the work on their own, and most of them hire local farmers and take them with them, and over time, these workers can also skillfully complete most of the technical work in the field. But there are still some delicate work that they can only do on their own.

Spring Festival is the flowering season of soybeans, corn, rice, etc., which is the most critical moment, especially for those crops that need artificial pollination, people need to pay attention to the opening time of each flower at any time, and complete pollination in just over ten minutes. More than ten minutes, for the pollination of a flower, it is already a long time, but in this experimental station, there are hundreds of acres of land planted with hundreds of thousands of breeding materials. In the whole of Sanya, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of land, as well as Lingshui, Ledong and other places in Hainan, there are also a large number of Nanfan bases.

Since 2002, Wisdom, a researcher at the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has rented more than 7 acres of land on a barren hill, breeding millet generation after generation. In her memory, in the twenty years, only one year, because of something at home, she hurriedly returned home in the first month, and then rushed back to Sanya.

More than 40 acres of soybean pollination is almost all done by technicians

At 2023 o'clock in the afternoon of March 3, 19, Zhao Zhichao, a researcher at the Institute of Composition Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, who was tightly covered with his whole body, hurriedly came out of the experimental station, patrolled a paddy field outside the station, and rode an electric car to a rice field more than ten kilometers away from the experimental station, where a batch of rice materials from Heilongjiang was planted, which was ripe, and it was necessary to quickly take it back, dry it, send it back to Heilongjiang, where it continued to be planted, and now, spring plowing in Heilongjiang is about to begin, and time is very tight.

Despite wearing long-sleeved trousers and long rain boots, and a face scarf around his face, the exposed hands can still see the traces of sun exposure. Walking in the fields, it is difficult to distinguish breeding scientists from ordinary farmers, and their difference can be seen only when they prepare "farm tools".

The material for breeding is diverse, so when harvesting, instead of a sickle, only scissors are used to cut the ears of rice, put them in separate small bags, and label them. Scissors, pen and paper, and bags are essential agricultural tools. If you want to identify agronomic traits, you also need to uproot the whole crop and bring it back for testing, but in Sanya, it is more just additive breeding, and only a small number of traits need to be identified.

Hybrid farming tools vary depending on the crop. When rice is removed from males, only scissors are used to cut off the male flowers, skilled workers, basically will not harm the pistil, pollination is relatively simple, workers can do it. The deandrosification and pollination of soybeans are carried out at the same time, which is much more technically demanding for the operator. The flowers of soybeans are very small, the pistils and stamens are in the same closed bud, without external force, self-pollination can be completed, but hybrid breeding, just do not need soybean self-inbring, pollination, first use a small tweezers, peel off the petals, gently remove the stamens, the process must not touch the pistil, and then pollinate, in order to complete hybridization.

In the more than 40 acres of soybeans that Hong Huilong is responsible for, almost all the pollination work is done by technicians, especially important materials, he dare not hand over to the workers, once he misses, several years of hard work will be in vain. Fortunately, the amount of each material is not much.

At noon, Hong Huilong, his colleagues and teachers sat quietly in the soybean field, one by one, looking for the flowers that were blooming, pollinating them with tweezers, and writing a label to hang each one.

The pollination of millet is extensive and much simpler, also at noon, the hybrid varieties are cross-planted according to the designed area, and when flowering, a bamboo pole is used to gently pluck the ear of grain to "drive" the pollen, and the hybridization is naturally completed.

Many scientists gradually made their home in Hainan

People in Nanfang migrate every year like migratory birds, but there may be many places where they stay.

Xu Xiaojie, an assistant at the Institute of Composition Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is in charge of more than 40 acres of corn fields in Sanya, staying there for more than four months a year, from sowing to harvesting. After leaving Sanya, he would follow the harvested seeds to the next stop, which could be a base in Shunyi or Changping, Beijing, or a base in Xinxiang, Henan. There to continue with the next cycle.

There are about ten days between the two generations of seed harvesting, which is his holiday, and he will return to his hometown in Hunan, and if he encounters late harvest or early planting, the vacation will be shortened.

2023 is Xu Xiaojie's tenth year in Nanfan, and his child is just ten years old.

Hong Huilong, on the other hand, has changed from an intern who just graduated from college to a postdoctoral fellow in the past twelve years, and in the past twelve years, he has completed a career change by working and studying.

In 2021, Hong Huilong got married, and the couple rented a house in Beijing, but Hong Huilong rarely had the opportunity to return home, he was in charge of soybean breeding in several bases in Sanya, Beijing and Heilongjiang, and even in Beijing, most of them lived in the base.

Many scientists gradually settle down in Hainan, so that they can have a place to live in the four- to five-month Nanfang season, rather than living in the experimental station for a long time, which is not spacious, and dozens of teachers and hundreds of students settle here every year.

There are also people who bought cars for the convenience of getting out of the ground. Over the years, the land around the base has become increasingly insufficient, and breeders have begun to walk out of the base from a very early age and rent land everywhere to plant.

The more than seven acres of land that Wisdom used for breeding by researcher Zhi of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences was rented around the farm, and Wisdom's husband Diao Xianmin is the leader of this research group and the chief scientist of the national millet industrial technology system. Twenty years ago, when they first rented this land, it was still a deserted grassland, and it could not be planted at all, but the teachers and students of the research group reclaimed and sorted out the desert beach little by little, turning the desert beach into fertile land, and in twenty years, dozens of high-quality millet varieties have been bred here.

On March 3th, when the ears of grain in the field were golden, two entrepreneurs who were interested in their varieties came to their fields to discuss the transformation of results, and they specially changed into clean and tidy clothes.

He wears a two-layer wide-brimmed hat, a face covered with a face towel, and wears a suit, patrolling and observing plants in the grain field, as if he is not walking in the Nanfan base at the end of the world, but walking in the slanting sun of his hometown.

The older generation of breeders can see at a glance whether the material is good or bad

In the Nanfan base, people who work with their heads down can easily lose their sense of time and space.

At five o'clock in the afternoon of March 3, in the more than 19 acres of cornfield, Xu Xiaojie and several workers were collecting corn, and people stood in the middle of the tall corn, as if they were in a yellow gauze tent, and there were only yellow corn stalks and plump or shriveled ears of corn in front of them. And squatting in the soybean field, the yellow dead leaves and brown pods in front of you are like in the soybean field in the northeast.

Only after harvesting the group, walking out of the corn jungle and seeing the tall coconut trees and lush banana groves in the distance, did I suddenly feel that this is Hainan, a tourist attraction and a place for leisure.

Unlike the mature varieties grown in the field, every material in the test may go wrong at any time, and they must observe every subtle change at any time.

"Although biotechnology is very advanced, it is still not a substitute for the eyes of breeders." Hong Huilong said.

Breeders of the older generation can see the quality of a material at a glance, while young people like him need to accumulate experience year after year and cultivate feelings through observation after observation.

From the first time I met soybeans, after twelve years of Nanfan, Hong Huilong gradually had a little experience of his own.

In the breeding process, traits are unstable, variations are strange, good and bad, can not judge good and bad, in the eyes of ordinary people, a field that grows unevenly, but breeders can understand the characteristics of each plant, and find those unusual changes in the first time. "Now walking through the ground, basically every material can know what it should look like and whether there is a change." Hong Huilong said, "At least I won't look black and easily let go of those special mutations." ”

Although it is mainly based on additive breeding, in the base of Sanya, the selection of seeds is also a necessary work in breeding, but also a necessary skill, every student, is from the observation and measurement of plant height, internode length, flower color, number of tillers, ear grain number and other crop phenotypes, little by little into the world of breeding, and the concentration of countless breeding resources of Nanfang, is undoubtedly the best practice opportunity.

Lamps are set up in the field to supplement the lack of light from soybeans

At six o'clock in the afternoon of March 3, in the cornfield that Xu Xiaojie was responsible for, the harvest came to an end, and the recovered corn was packed in small bags, each bag had a label, and the label was a long string of letters and numbers, from these letters and numbers, Xu Xiaojie could clearly interpret a lot of information, such as which scientist this corn belongs to, what kind of experimental project it was used for, after several generations of breeding, each generation chose which seed on the plant...

When sorting seeds in the field, the 10-year-old child called a video call, showing him the painting homework he had just completed in the video, Xu Xiaojie looked up at the sunset of the distant mountains, and carefully commented on the screen, "The tree is well drawn, the sun can also be, even the mountain can be perfected..."

Across a circle of railings, Zhao Zhichao, who had finished harvesting the seeds, had just taken a look in the rice field on the other side of the test station, where the rice material had just bloomed and there was still some time before harvesting. These materials are not unknown, but come from Jingxi rice in northwest Beijing.

Jingxi rice is a geographical indication agricultural product in Beijing, which has been cultivated for hundreds of years and was loved by Beijing locals in the past as royal tribute rice. However, in the past two decades or so, due to the lack of water resources, the cultivation of Jingxi rice was interrupted for a while, and in recent years, the planting has resumed, and the local government has entrusted the team of academician Wan Jianmin of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences to help improve the variety and enhance the flavor.

As a team member, Zhao Zhichao also needs to take care of these Jingxi rice materials to ensure that they can be successfully added in Hainan and will not have accidents due to changes in the environment.

Despite Sanya's warm winter climate, southbound seeds do not necessarily adapt. In fact, many seeds that grow in the north do not grow well after arriving in Sanya, such as soybeans from Beijing and Heilongjiang, planted on farms in Sanya, and if special measures are not taken, they may grow more than 10 centimeters tall and produce two or three pods. Students who do experiments here often encounter the experience of bringing 10 seeds and only receiving three or five seeds.

"Hainan is a short-light area, with only about 12 hours of light a day, while in Heilongjiang, the light during the soybean growing period can reach 15-16 hours." Hong Huilong said.

In order to allow soybeans in different regions to grow smoothly in Hainan, Hong Huilong has set up dense lamps in the field, and the proportion of light of each wavelength of light has been carefully designed to supplement the lack of light, in addition to various measures, such as temperature control and insect control.

In Hong Huilong's field, soybeans are more visible to the naked eye, and when work ends in the evening, he walks through the soybean fields that have not yet been harvested, observing all the way, "This year will not lose money." ”

Beijing News reporter Zhou Huaizong