China greatly encourage to extend super-rice planting area in 2012

The Ministry of Agriculture of China organized a conference in Guangxi province to greatly encourage the planting area of super-rice in the country in 2012. The total super-rice planting area will reach 8 million hectares in 2012 and it would increase about 9% over last year (7.3 million ha).
In 2011, China created 59 new super-rice cultivars with 18 relative planting technologies. Up to now, there are total 83 national wide recognized super-rice cultivars all over the country and they covered 118 counties in 17 provinces. In China, super-rice planting area has occupied 24.7% of the total rice area with average grain yield 8.5t/ha. This yield was 1,017kg/ha, 13.2% and higher than other rice cultivars with extra net income US$273/ha.
The research results from our cooperative projects of IPNI China Program showed that compare with common hybrid rice cultivars, super-rice need about 20% more fertilizers, especially potash fertilizer. With the planting area increase, the better nutrient management technology such as 4R will become more and more important for the sustainable development of super-rice.