Stories of High-Quality Development｜Intensive cultivation unlocks the potential of small seeds

Narrator: Chen Jianhong, Deputy Mayor of Xinxiang City, Henan Province, Executive Deputy Director of Management Committee of Henan Zhongyuan Nonggu, Secretary of the Party Working Committee of Xinxiang Pingyuan Urban-Rural Integration Demonstration Zone

In October 2024, a wheat variety named "Pubing 03" sold for 6.66 million yuan ($970,000) at the Central Plains Agricultural Valley in central China's Henan Province. Eight months later, its developer had signed contracts with 65 agents, covering 73 counties and districts nationwide, with a key market coverage rate of over 90 percent.

Behind this seed lies 38 years of dedication by the research team led by Li Lihui, a researcher at the Institute of Crop Sciences under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. As a member of the team, Zhang Jinpeng, a researcher at the Zhongyuan Research Center and the Institute of Crop Sciences, is committed to enabling more high-quality seeds to flourish and bear fruit across even broader lands. Currently, "Pubing 03" has been promoted and applied in provinces such as Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shaanxi.

In 2025, Henan Province, with 6.25 percent of the nation's cultivated land, produced 25 percent of the country's wheat and 10 percent of its total grain, supplying 30 million tonnes of raw grain and processed products annually. As a major provincial economic powerhouse, Henan's role as a "ballast stone" is reflected not only in its output but also in the institutional and mechanism innovations it has developed to safeguard national food security.

At the Central Plains Agricultural Valley, a seed industry innovation hub spanning 1,612 square kilometers, the province has brought together 17 academicians, 69 innovation teams and more than 470 high-level seed industry professionals. It has built 67 research platforms at the provincial level or above and preserved 200,000 germplasm resources. More importantly, it has developed a "golden triangle" model in which enterprises raise questions, the government sets the agenda and scientists provide answers. The model lets researchers like Li and Zhang focus wholeheartedly on their research and helps top varieties like "Pubing 03" move swiftly from the laboratory to the field.

From a single seed to an industry, a major provincial economic powerhouse shoulders significant responsibility — not merely through scale but through the strategic resilience to "hold firm" in key areas and the institutional innovation to "find a way forward." Food security is a matter of utmost national importance. With the commitment of the "Central Plains Granary," Henan has helped keep the nation's rice bowl firmly in hand, offering a vivid example of how a major provincial economic powerhouse can serve as a cornerstone of stability.