Beijing Agricultural College： Breeding and planting are embedded in the ＂technical core＂, and the new ＂potato＂ light of sweet potato industry in generate.
Beijing Agricultural College pays attention to the advantages of urban agricultural talents, technologies and platforms, promotes the coordinated development strategy of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and the rural revitalization strategy as a whole, and carries out technical extension services around the needs of sweet potato breeding and planting in vast areas of Hebei to promote the green, high-quality and high-yield development of sweet potato industry.
I. Basic information
Hebei province is the main producing area of sweet potato in China, with a long planting history. In recent years, the planting area has stabilized at about 2 million mu. Because of drought and flood, sweet potato is called a hard-core crop by growers. However, there are still some problems in the old sweet potato planting areas in Hebei Province, such as variety degradation, extensive planting techniques, pests and diseases caused by repeated cropping for many years and so on. Since 2006, the sweet potato breeding and planting team of the College of Plant Science and Technology of Beijing Agricultural College has gone deep into the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, adhered to the close combination of field and classroom, theory and practice, research and development and popularization, innovation and service, and brought a lot of practical information and technology to sweet potato growers, covering 11 prefecture-level cities and more than 60 counties such as Baoding, Langfang, Chengde and Zhangjiakou in Hebei, and established a stable service cooperation relationship with Shuanghua Agricultural Products Planting Professional Cooperative in Gu ‘an County of Langfang, which radiated Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. Zhao Bo, the team leader, was awarded as "Advanced Individual in Rural Work in Beijing (2017-2021)".
Second, the implementation progress
(1) Demonstration and popularization of new sweet potato varieties. For a long time, the first generation varieties accounted for about 50%, the second generation and the third generation varieties accounted for about 30% in the production of sweet potato in the vast area of Hebei, and the variety upgrading was lagging behind, which could not meet the demand of sweet potato producers for economic benefits or consumers for fresh sweet potato quality, thus affecting the development of sweet potato industry in this area. Since 2016, the sweet potato team has successively introduced the fifth-generation sweet potato varieties, such as Pushu 32, Yanshu 25, Longshu 9 and Shangshu 19, in Langfang, Chengde, Zhangjiakou and Tangshan, which made the local sweet potato variety structure jump from the first generation to the fifth generation at that time, the yield level was improved, the quality was obviously improved, which met the market requirements for the taste and appearance of fresh foods, the income of growers was guaranteed, and the introduced new varieties were obtained.
(two) demonstration and popularization of cold bed seedling technology. The method of raising seedlings with fire resistance is a common method of raising seedlings of sweet potato in North China. The seedbed is simple in structure and convenient to build. Coal, straw and firewood can be used as heating materials, and it is easy to obtain materials, but there are also problems of high energy consumption and serious environmental pollution. However, the method of multi-layer covered cold bed seedling raising in solar greenhouse or small and medium shed can meet the temperature requirements of sweet potato seedling raising without heating, eliminating the consumption of fuel and electric energy, greatly reducing the cost, and eliminating the pollution of coal burning and burning straw to the atmospheric environment, which has ecological benefits of energy saving and emission reduction. The sweet potato team took the lead in popularizing advanced cold bed seedling raising technology in Gu ‘an County of Langfang, lulong county of Qinhuangdao, yutian county of Tangshan and other places, and implemented systematic improvement in facilities selection, seedbed construction, seed potato stacking, soil covering thickness, temperature control, disease control and other aspects, so that the weight of 100 potato seedlings was increased from 250 grams to more than 500 grams, reaching the standard of strong seedlings, the seedling quality was significantly improved, and the energy consumption and pollution were significantly reduced.
(3) Vigorously support industrialized seedling raising. Industrial seedling raising is an important guarantee for obtaining excellent provenance. For a long time, most of the sweet potato seedlings in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region were propagated by farmers for their own use or transferred from neighboring provinces. There are some problems such as relatively backward breeding technology, uneven quality of potato seedlings, untraceable production losses caused by fake and inferior potato seedlings, and uncertain supply time. Focusing on the cultivation of excellent seed potato seedlings, the sweet potato planting team started with rapid propagation technology and supported the new agricultural management entities to implement factory seedling raising. In 2019, we began to cooperate with Shuanghua Agricultural Products Planting Professional Cooperative in Gu ‘an County, Langfang, to establish a standard chemical plant seedling base, carry out large-scale seed potato seedling cultivation, and provide service guidance from production management, technical training and market development. In the past three years, the annual output of high-quality sweet potato seedlings has reached about 35 million, and the application area has reached more than 12,000 mu. The application scope includes Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Xinjiang and other vast areas, effectively reducing costs, effectively curbing the phenomenon of indiscriminate introduction, proliferation and sales of seed potato seedlings in the market, and making sweet potato growers affordable and comfortable to use.
III. Main Features and Effects
(A) technology research and development and technology promotion are closely integrated. Scientific research "originates from production and is used for production". The sweet potato breeding and planting team insists on demand-oriented and problem-oriented, so that tasks come from production, demand, market, scientific research results go to production, farmers and enterprises, so as to accelerate the transformation of agricultural scientific and technological innovations into real productive forces and write the "Sweet Potato Paper" on the land of Yanzhao. For more than ten years, while breeding marketable sweet potato varieties, the sweet potato team has successively promoted and applied more than 10 green, high-yield and high-efficiency production supporting planting management technologies such as virus-free seed potato rapid propagation, high-temperature healing seed potato storage, cold bed laying seedlings, seedling bed soil disinfection, etc. around sweet potato stem tip virus-free and improved seed breeding in vast areas of Hebei, with an average annual planting scale of over 10,000 mu, thus escorting the sweet potato industry to improve quality and efficiency. For example, in view of the safe storage of seed potatoes in winter, the storage technology of high-temperature healing seed potatoes is adopted to reduce the rotten rate of seed potatoes and improve the vitality of seed potatoes; The soil disinfection method combining sunlight, irrigation and chemicals effectively eliminated the soil-borne diseases of sweet potato; Adopting the technical process of virus-free sweet potato two-stage seedling breeding, the tissue culture seedlings directly produce the original seeds, which improves the quality by one level, advances the time by one year, reduces the production times of seed potatoes in the soil, and makes the seedlings cleaner.
(2) Online and offline technical services are not dropped. At the beginning of 2020, there was a once-in-a-century epidemic in COVID-19. For a long time, although the flow of people was restricted, the scientific and technological service activities of the expert team did not stop. According to the time, place and classification guidance, they worked "continuously" and served "continuously", which minimized the impact of the epidemic on agricultural production and ensured the smooth flow of agricultural technology services in the last mile. Especially in the early stage of the outbreak, faced with various uncertain factors, the expert team actively provided online guidance to 21 sweet potato seedling enterprises in Chengde, Langfang, Tangshan and Baoding through WeChat and telephone, helping to solve the technical problems of large-scale sweet potato seedling farmers in time. In March, 2020, Langfang area issued blue warning of gale for many times, and the expert team immediately telephoned 12 seedling farmers in Xueputou Village, Gu ‘an County to reinforce 110 plastic greenhouses and 4 solar greenhouses, thus avoiding losses in time.
(3) Supporting new agricultural business entities and highlighting the effect of linking agriculture with agriculture. Compared with traditional small farmers, new agricultural business entities, such as large-scale farmers, family farms, farmers’ professional cooperatives and leading enterprises in agricultural industrialization, are large-scale, specialized, intensive and market-oriented, which have unique advantages in linking agriculture with agriculture and can give consideration to both economic and social benefits. In the process of technology promotion, the sweet potato breeding and planting team has signed a technical service agreement with Shuanghua Agricultural Products Planting Professional Cooperative in Gu ‘an County of Langfang since 2019, forming a working mode of interest community of "expert team+village collective+cooperative+farmer". Through the effective mechanism of benefit sharing and risk sharing, the annual output value of the cooperative is supported to reach 3-5 million. Under the guidance of experts’ regular service, the cooperative nursery bed is stable at 30,000-50,000 square meters all the year round, which can directly provide 50 stable jobs every year, with 100 workers in busy farming hours, and at the same time, radiation drives more than 1,000 employees in surrounding planting, deep processing and logistics, and gradually forms a sweet potato industrial chain integrating seedling raising, planting, storage and sales.
(4) Go deep into the fields and send the technology to the hearts of farmers. The promotion and upgrading of new sweet potato varieties should be closely combined with the promotion of planting techniques to achieve higher efficiency. In view of the fact that there are few young and middle-aged laborers in rural areas and the elderly have become the main force of agricultural production, the expert team explored the technology of close planting and shallow planting of sweet potato, which controlled the shape of sweet potato by adjusting the planting density, and increased the number of potato nodes by planting sweet potato seedlings in the soil, thus achieving the purpose of increasing yield and reducing labor intensity. Of course, the promotion of new technology is a slow process, limited by traditional habits, knowledge structure and cognitive level. Older growers don’t recognize new planting technology, and often experts just leave after class, and farmers still do it in their own way. In order to verify the outstanding effect of the new technology, the team of experts intervened in the whole process of sweet potato production, and demonstrated and guided the whole process from sweet potato seedling raising to mature harvesting, guiding farmers to change their concepts with facts and reality. In the past 10 years, team members have gone to the countryside for more than 1,500 days, and trained more than 300 farmers every year on average. By promoting new varieties and technologies, many villagers who are unable and unconditional to go out for employment have realized income generation at their doorsteps.
Fourth, experience and enlightenment
(1) Build a platform. The development of technology extension service can not be separated from the corresponding work platform. The school has incorporated the sweet potato planting and breeding promotion into the overall layout of serving the coordinated development of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, and established poverty alleviation workstations, professor workstations, doctoral workstations and technology transfer sub-centers in Chengde, Zhangjiakou and Tangshan, respectively, to promote the collaborative interaction among universities, research institutes, local governments and new agricultural business entities, and promote the integration of Industry-University-Research through the expert team’s on-site service, so as to make the promotion service site a gathering place for talents of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, an experimental field for scientific and technological innovation, and an incubator for the application of achievements.
(2) Based on demand. To carry out technology promotion, we should consider whether enterprises need it, whether farmers accept it, and whether the market supply and demand are reasonable, so as to truly solve the pain points in the agricultural industry. To this end, even if you spend more time on research, the so-called "sharpening the knife without cutting the wood by mistake." All the technologies around sweet potato stem tip detoxification and improved seed breeding are born in response to production problems and should be promoted by market benefits. If they are not combined with production and ignore market feedback, even advanced technologies will have no value of popularization and application.
(3) carry forward feelings. The main battlefield of technology popularization is the grass-roots front line, which is often arduous and backward. To be effective, the promotion work needs to run around mountains, ravines and fields all the year round. It is consistent with a kind of dedication, selfless feelings and selfless feelings. If you always consider the gains and losses, you can’t do the promotion work well. Making friends with farmers, the sweet potato planting team can not only sit and talk, but also act. Together with sweet potato growers, they are sweating in the hot sun, braving the heat, winning the trust of farmers, promoting stable and lasting cooperation and achieving a win-win situation.
V. Plans for further promotion
(1) The promotion and demonstration of new sweet potato varieties are uninterrupted. Continue to strengthen the promotion of new sweet potato varieties in Chengde, Tangshan, Zhangjiakou and Langfang, Hebei Province, and radiate to Jinghai, Tianjin, Nanyang, Henan Province and Yiyuan, Shandong Province.
(2) The demonstration and promotion of cold bed seedling raising technology of sweet potato is uninterrupted. The system integrates various technologies such as seedling site selection, seedbed construction, seed potato stacking, soil covering, pest control, environmental condition control, seedling quality control, seedling collection and so on, and continuously improves the popularization and demonstration system of sweet potato cold bed seedling technology to enhance the scale of sweet potato cold bed seedling in Hebei Province.
(3) Continuous technical training and consultation. Fulfill the duties of scientific and technological workers, strengthen the responsibility of scientific and technological workers, insist on putting their feet in the soil and writing papers on the earth, go to villages and households to guide improved varieties and good methods, disseminate technical essentials, cultivate a group of soil experts, Tian Xiucai and new farmers, and ensure that the "standardized" application of sweet potato breeding and planting technology is effectively transmitted.