The new rice is a result of decades of research. Image: South China Morning Post
In the early ’70s, a guy named Yuan Longping developed a few different strains of hybrid rice and changed how the entire planet eats. You’ve probably never heard of him because rice isn’t exactly a hot-button topic, but Longping, fearing that the population of China was going to explode (how right he was!) and they’d face a food-shortage of epic proportions, decided he’d do something about it. He developed rice that grew faster and bigger, and now, according to IFLScience, something like 20 percent of the world’s rice is a species that he created. Well, he might’ve changed the way we eat rice again–and this time, on a much larger scale. Yuan Longping made rice that can grow in saltwater that could feed over 200 million people.
It’s called “sea-rice, and Longping (along with a team of scientists, of course), created it at the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research And Development Center. Yes, there’s a center for that. Saline tolerant rice species are already around, but they sort of suck. “If a farmer tries to grow some types of saline-tolerant rice now, he or she most likely will get 1,500 kilograms per hectare,” Yuan said. “That is just not profitable and not even worth the effort.” While regular rice is grown in paddies with fresh water, this rice was grown on a salty beach the Yellow Sea.
The rice was grown on a salty beach in the Yellow Sea. Image: South China Morning Post
Yuan’s new rice doubles the previous strains of saline-tolerant rice, which surprised everyone–even Yuan. After they’d finished their small-scale trials–and the years and years of cross-breeding–researchers completed full-scale trials just a few months ago. Using diluted seawater from the Yellow Sea, they found that their newly developed rice strain was happy as a pig in shit. “The seawater rice developed by Yuan and other research teams is not irrigated by pure seawater,” the South China Morning Post explained, “but mixes it with fresh water to reduce the salt content to 6 grams per liter. The average liter of seawater contains five times as much salt.”
As it stands right now, vast tracts of land in China aren’t usable for growing most crops because the water supply is too saline. Another benefit? Since insects have a much harder time living in high-saline environments, the rice won’t need nearly as many pesticides. “China has one million square kilometers of wasteland, an area the size of Ethiopia, where plants struggle to grow because of high salinity or alkalinity levels in the soil,” wrote the South China Morning Post. “The seawater rice was grown on virgin land where no crops had been planted before.”
