Dry rice cultivated from 7,000-year-old 'weed' may mitigate global food crisis

Published Jul 8, 2020

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By Li Lei A 7,000-year-old crop variety discovered in China has been turned into commercial crop that can be planted in desert, which has the potential to help solve food crisis in regions and countries with a dry climate. Dry rice, also known as upland rice, has attracted attention of some African and Asian countries even during its trial planting period.

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Upland rice grown in a desert in Karamay city of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region | Photo: Courtesy of Peng Guowei Some foreign countries including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia have sent personnel to visit the plant's developers for the purpose of introducing dry rice planting technologies to their countries, Peng Guowei, the developer, told the Global Times. As China's eighth biggest desert, Ulan Buh desert in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is in an area of more than one million hectares. In June, some 347 hectares of the desert has been sowed with dry rice as experimental field. Dry rice seedlings in an experimental field in a desert | Photo: Courtesy of Peng Guowei Different with regular rice that grows in paddy field, dry rice grows in normal land and yields rice with much less water needed. Dry rice planted nowadays is from a variety that has existed in China for more than 7,000 years, which has been treated as weed until ...

Source: Agropages