In 2021, Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice", passed away, and the whole country mourned and tens of thousands of people said goodbye. The amount of his "Oriental Magic Rice" increased is enough to feed 70 million people for a whole year.
What people didn't expect is that now there is another "Yuan Longping", who has increased grain output by 100 billion catties, and can directly support 500 million more people.
What is so awesome about him, and what is the difference between him and "Yuan Longping"?
A source of faith
In fact, his reputation in the field of agriculture has always been resounding: Li Zhensheng.
It's just that for ordinary people, everyone's focus is more on "Yuan Longping". The name "Father of Hybrid Rice" is well known to many people, but the name of "Father of Hybrid Wheat" is almost not well understood.
In 1931, Li Zhensheng was born in Zibo, Shandong, and although he didn't eat much when he was a child, he didn't get to the point of "starvation".
Who knew that 11 years later, he would have the most profound experience of "hungry". This year, the hometown suddenly suffered a famine, and every household ran out of food and began a life of staring and starving.
It didn't take long for all the turf, tree bark, and weeds to be swept away by the villagers. The young Li Zhensheng often carried plastic bags from morning to night, and he didn't get anything.
In addition to his own hunger, he witnessed the death of many people he knew, and when he was young, he may only feel sad in his heart, but perhaps since then, some "seeds" have taken root in his heart.
Not having enough to eat is a big deal, but going to school is also a big deal. Although he was hungry every day, Li Zhensheng's studies did not fall behind at all.
Parents attach great importance to education, and each of the four children in the family is in school. Unfortunately, after the death of her father, the pressure on her mother to face the tuition and child support of her four children became enormous.
Li Zhensheng's elder brother couldn't bear to see his mother so tired, so he began to work to earn money to pay for his younger siblings' tuition. When he was about the second year of high school, Li Zhensheng realized that he couldn't let his brother "sacrifice" alone, so he gave up his originally very good studies and went to Jinan to work.
In the process of working part-time, Li Zhensheng often reminisced about his time on campus, and his thirst for knowledge often made him stunned.
Enter the field of agriculture
One day, Li Zhensheng saw a sign with an enrollment profile hanging at the entrance of Shandong Agricultural College, which read: Room and board are free.
Li Zhensheng was moved, but he hadn't touched a book for several years, and he didn't know the bottom of his heart. But thinking that if he could be admitted, he took the exam, and he actually got in.
He finally returned to school, and he cherished the opportunity to go to school. In the agricultural class, the scene of "hungry" appeared in front of him, and an indescribable feeling surged in his heart.
After graduating, he was assigned to the cultivation group of the Genetic Selection Experimental Hall of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and it was here that his understanding of forage plants was laid.
In 1956, the call for the construction of the Great Northwest was responded to by the whole country, and Li Zhensheng directly gave up his luxurious life and ran to the Great Northwest.
Who knows, it was when he was supporting the construction of the Great Northwest that the emergence of "wheat stripe rust" changed the trajectory of his life. The harm of this fungus to wheat is what cancer is to humans.
Not only that, but the disease is also very contagious. When a gust of wind blew, the spores of the virus began to drift in the wind, and it was not long before the wheat across the country was "attacked", and the wheat production was greatly reduced.
As a researcher with in-depth research on forage plants, Li Zhensheng is very distressed by this. He began to study wheat-related problems all day.
"The Father of Hybrid Wheat"
After searching and researching day and night, he finally found a plant resistant to "yellow rust": Yanwheat grass. He transplanted the antibody genes from this plant into wheat, and then found the best batch of wheat among the many participating wheat.
He spent a lot of time experimenting, pollinating, and screening, but each time the results were not satisfactory. So he continued to cross those seedlings with strong antibodies and high yields, and screened them from generation to generation.
For more than 20 years, he took root in the field, constantly searching for possibilities in the impossible, and finally got the result he wanted in 1979.
His research team finally incorporated the genes for the viral resistance of Yanweed into wheat, and due to their extensive experimentation, many different, but high-quality wheat varieties appeared, including Xiaoyan 4, 6 and so on.
Xiaoyan 6 alone successfully increased the yield of 4 billion kilograms of wheat in the experiment on 150 million acres of land, which surprised the research team.
With the improvement of wheat varieties, Li Zhensheng has won many national honors and awards in the scientific and technological circles. Therefore, there is such a sentence in the research community: "There is Yuan Longping in the south, and Li Zhensheng in the north."
At the turn of the millennium, China's total wheat output increased by tens of billions of catties per year, even exceeding the increase in rice production.
Spending his youth and blood on the field, even if the wheat he studied all his life has achieved great results, Li Zhensheng still did not stop his pace.
Although his health was not very good after years of labor, when he seized the opportunity, he would still run to the fields, to various wheat experimental fields, and even dragged his old body many times to the northwest where he had stayed for many years.
Although he is not on the front line, once there is any new discovery or research results, he will share the results with researchers as soon as possible.
Research is a big problem, but having research results does not mean that it is easy, and how to promote it is also a huge problem. Many farmers have their own set of habitual planting methods, and in the face of new technologies, they are more likely to have a skeptical mentality.
For this reason, Li Zhensheng went to the farmers' homes with seeds and technology, persuaded them with painstaking efforts, and continued to do ideological work. In addition, he went directly to the farmers' fields and helped them plant.
The result is the best answer, and many farmers have finally let down their guard against Li Zhensheng and the new technology when they see the bumper harvest of wheat.