1960 rare natural and man-made disasters brought about a serious food famine, and one by one patients with sallow edema fell down ... Longping's 5-foot body also directly experienced the pain of hunger.

Yuan Longping witnessed the cruel reality, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. He thought of the old society, where people were exploited and oppressed by the ruling class, suffered from war, lacked food and clothing, and were displaced. Today, people are the masters of their own affairs, but they are still not free from the threat of hunger. He is determined to give full play to his intelligence and expertise, and use the professional knowledge he has learned to cultivate new rice varieties with yield of 800 kg/mu, 1000 kg and 2000 kg/mu as soon as possible, so as to greatly increase the grain yield and overcome hunger with agricultural science and technology.

Yuan Longping is in favor of such a formula: knowledge+sweat+inspiration+opportunity = success.

Based on his profound understanding of genetics, he carefully observed and statistically analyzed the degraded plants in the experimental field, which not only proved that the rice plants that stood out were "natural hybrid rice", but also fully proved that rice had obvious heterosis from the good growth of its first generation. The experimental results convinced him that the research of hybrid rice is promising!

However, hybrid rice is a world problem. Because rice is a hermaphrodite crop, it is difficult to remove the male flowers one by one for hybridization. In this way, before crossing with other varieties, it is necessary to cultivate a male sterile rice plant, that is, a male sterile line. This is a worldwide problem. Yuan Longping went ahead in spite of difficulties. He believes that the original parents of male sterile lines are naturally mutated male sterile plants and can also exist naturally. There are many varieties of wild rice and cultivated rice in China, and the seed resources are rich. This is a free rice kingdom. "If foreign countries are not successful, China people may not be successful."

Yuan Longping took his legs and walked into the vast green sea of rice, looking for a kind of rice male sterile plant that had never been seen and reported in Chinese and foreign materials. As time went by, Yuan Longping stood in the scorching sun, stepped on the mud, hunched over, and searched from ear to ear. Many things happen. Finally, on the fourth day of/kloc-0, a plant with male flowers and strange characters was discovered. Yuan Longping was ecstatic.

From June 1964 to July 1965, he and his wife Deng Ze discovered six more male sterile plants. When mature, the seeds of the first generation of naturally pollinated male sterile materials are harvested respectively. After two spring and autumn experiments and the analysis of scientific data, the first important paper, Rice Male Sterility, was written and published in the fourth issue of Science Bulletin, volume 1966. It is also predicted that through further breeding, male sterile lines, maintainer lines (maintaining male sterility in offspring) and restorer lines (restoring male fertility) can be obtained, and the three lines can be matched, making it possible to make use of the advantages of the first generation of hybrid rice, which will bring about large-scale and large-scale agricultural production increase. The publication of this important paper was regarded by some colleagues as the marching horn of "blowing the second green revolution".

After eight years of hard work, 1974 successfully prepared seeds and determined its advantages. 1975, with the support of Hunan provincial party Committee and provincial government, large-scale seed production was successful, and seeds were prepared for large-scale popularization in the following year, which made the research results enter the stage of large-scale popularization.

1in the winter of 975, the State Council made a decision to rapidly expand trial planting and popularize hybrid rice in large quantities. The state has invested a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources to carry out breeding and seed production three times a year, and promoted it at the fastest speed. 1976 fixed-point demonstration of 2.08 million mu, the national application of production. By 1988, the area of hybrid rice in China was1940,000 mu, accounting for 39.6% of the rice area, while the total output accounted for 18.5%. In the year of 10, the total planting area of hybrid rice in China was12.56 million mu, and the total output value increased by10 billion kilograms, which achieved great economic and social benefits. The masses praised that the problem of eating was solved by two "flats", one by the policy of the top of the CPC Central Committee and the other by the hybrid rice in Yuan Longping. People spoke the minds of hundreds of millions of farmers in China in plain language.

With the successful planting of hybrid rice and its large-scale popularization in China, Yuan Longping became famous in one fell swoop. In the face of achievements and honors, Yuan Longping publicly claimed that the shortcomings of hybrid rice cultivated at this stage are "three more and three less", that is, "the previous strength is more than enough, and the stamina is insufficient; Too many tillers and insufficient panicles; There are more ears and fewer seeds, so the organization assistant takes measures from breeding and cultivation.

In the early 1980s, facing the worldwide famine, Yuan Longping once again had an amazing idea, and boldly put forward the topic of super-high yield breeding of hybrid rice, trying to solve the hunger problem in a wider range.

1985 with a strong sense of responsibility, Yuan Longping published the article "Discussion on Super-high-yield Breeding of Hybrid Rice", and put forward four ways to cultivate super-high-yield combinations with strong advantages, among which the most important thing is to cultivate nuclear hybrids. However, many years of breeding practice did not produce a combination that met the production requirements. He decisively and quickly jumped out of the study of nuclear-cytoplasmic hybrids and explored new and more promising research fields.

With rich imagination, keen intuition and bold creative spirit, Yuan Longping conscientiously summed up the century-old history of crop breeding and the 20-year experience of "three-line hybrid rice" breeding, as well as the rich breeding materials he had mastered. 1987, he put forward the "strategic thinking of hybrid rice breeding" and foresaw two strategic development stages of hybrid rice, namely, the utilization of interspecific heterosis based on three-line method. Utilization of heterosis between indica and japonica subspecies based on two-line method: utilization of distant heterosis based on one-line method. This is another new peak in the development of Yuan Longping's hybrid rice theory.

Under the guidance of Yuan Longping's strategic thought, following the discovery of a sterile photoperiod-sensitive genic male sterile material in the late japonica 58 natural population in 1973, in June 1987, Li Bihu's assistant Deng Huafeng discovered a photoperiod-sensitive sterile rice in the three-line indica rice breeding material of Anjiang Agricultural School. After two years and three generations of propagation and observation in different places, the agronomic characters of this material are neat and consistent, the sterile plant rate and sterility degree both reach 100%, the sterile period is stable in Anjiang for more than 50 days, and the fertility transformation is obvious and synchronous. This new achievement has opened up a new situation of hybrid rice from "three-line method" to "two-line method" The progress of apomixis research in rice also makes the one-line method take a gratifying step in using distant heterosis. Yuan Longping is full of confidence in the prospect of hybrid rice research.

With the trial planting of hybrid rice in various countries in the world, hybrid rice has attracted worldwide attention. In recent years, Yuan Longping has been invited to give lectures, impart technology, attend academic conferences or conduct technical cooperation research in 8 countries including the Philippines, the United States, Japan, France, Britain, Italy, Egypt and Australia 19 times. Yuan Longping's hybrid rice achievements won the first special invention award since the founding of New China in 198 1, and from 1985 to 1988, it won three international science awards in just four years. Dr. Swaminathan, director of the International Rice Research Institute and former Indian Minister of Agriculture, spoke highly: "We call Mr. Yuan Longping the' father of hybrid rice' because his achievements are not only the pride of China, but also the pride of the world, and his achievements have brought good news to mankind."

Yuan Longping, from the remote Anjiang Agricultural School in Hunan Province, has grown from a young teacher in a secondary agricultural school in a mountain village to a world-renowned celebrity and ascended the throne of "Father of Hybrid Rice". The research on hybrid rice is in the ascendant, and it is developing rapidly in the direction of Yuan Longping's new strategic concept!