“Chinese researchers have developed a revolutionary form of hybrid rice that can replicate itself through seeds that are clones, faithfully preserving high-yield traits generation after generation…

The price of hybrid seeds can reach 200 yuan (US$28) per kilogram in China, and even higher in other countries – up to 100 times more than that of regular rice seeds.

Moreover, the offspring of these high-priced seeds lose their hybrid vigour – superior traits from crossbreeding – forcing farmers to buy seeds again every year.

A research team led by Wang Kejian at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences’ China National Rice Research Institute has developed hybrid rice capable of near-perfect clonal reproduction through apomixis – a process in which seeds develop without fertilisation.

The team’s work, which is pending peer review, was published on the preprint server bioRxiv on October 17 under the title ‘Fixing Hybrid Rice: >99% Efficient Apomixis with Near-Normal Seed Set.’

Its new Fix8 series achieves more than 99.7 per cent cloning efficiency with seed-setting rates rivalling conventional hybrids, effectively creating self-replicating super rice.”

From South China Morning Post.

“We just lived through the period with the fastest population growth in human history. Six decades ago, there were three billion people on our planet. Since 2022, there have been more than eight billion people — an increase of five billion over this period.

It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace with population growth. But as the chart above shows, they grew even faster. On every continent, food supplies — measured by calories — grew faster than the population. This rise in food production per person was a major reason for the decline of extreme poverty and hunger.”

From Our World in Data.

“Fire-resistant seeds offer promise, at a low cost, for restoring areas devastated by burning in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna, a project by biologist Giovana Cavenaghi Guimarães shows.

Guimarães, a doctoral candidate at São Paulo State University (UNESP), focused on five species of Cerrado-native seeds, including jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril), amendoim-bravo (Pterogyne nitens), mulungu (Erythrina mulungu) and canafístula (Peltophorum dubium). All are naturally adapted to extreme heat.

According to Guimarães, these plants can survive in adverse conditions such as the high temperatures caused by wildfires, which makes their seeds ideal for environmental recovery after such events. The species also have a greater germination capacity: on average, 99% of seeds develop into trees…

According to Guimarães, planting seeds of these native fire-resistant species can be a solution to recover large areas destroyed by wildfires, especially in the Cerrado, the Brazilian biome that burns the most. Data from INPE, Brazil’s national space agency, showed 46.8% of all fire outbreaks recorded in the country in the first 10 months of the year — almost 50,000 — occurred in the Cerrado.”

From Mongabay.

“It wasn’t long ago that America’s fisheries were in a state of collapse, with cratering fish stocks and impractical regulations that threatened a $180 billion dollar industry.

Then, an unlikely alliance of environmental activists and fishermen turned things around, leaving the nation’s 4 million square miles of fishing grounds healthier – and more profitable – than they’ve been in decades…

Today, more than 50 U.S. fish stocks have bounced back from disaster, or are on track to, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the Gulf of Mexico, renamed Gulf of America by the U.S. government, there are up to three times as many red snapper as estimated in 2009. In Cape Cod and the Gulf of Maine, stocks of adult yellowtail flounder have jumped from 218 metric tons in 2006 to 3,800 metric tons in 2020…

As commercial fishing profits have gone up, 94% of assessed fisheries in the United States are now sustainable, according to NOAA.”

From USA TODAY.