SHIJIAZHUANG, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Squatting in the fields of a village in north China's Hebei Province, Guo Jinkao, 70, dug the ground with his bare hands until a sprouting wheat seed was exposed. He checked the growth of the seed before re-covering it with soil.

Guo, with a dark sun-tanned face, is not a farmer, but the chief wheat breeder of Hebei Province and the honorary president of the Shijiazhuang Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences.

Over the past 47 years, he has led his team in breeding nearly 30 high-yielding and water-saving wheat varieties. The latest one, "Malan No. 1," realized a record-high yield of 838.8 kg per mu, or 12.58 tonnes per hectare, in the province earlier this year.

Guo was born into a farmer's family in 1951 and witnessed the days of food shortages when he was a child.

"I dreamed of having steamed bread made from wheat flour every day back then," he recalled.

After graduating from an agricultural school, he came to the breeding base of Malan Farm in Malan Village, in the city of Xinji, in 1976, and has been working there ever since.

At that time, the average wheat yield of Hebei Province remained at around 300 kg per mu.

Guo said breeding a new variety took up to 10 years. "We could only experiment once a year. One year, we tested the cold endurance of a breed, while the next year, we would check the disease resistance," he said.

The farm developed a new wheat variety called "Jimai No. 26" in 1990, raising the wheat yield by one-third to more than 400 kg per mu. The breed was then widely adopted in Hebei, as well as other wheat production provinces in north China. In 1996, Guo's team developed "Jimai No. 38," setting a record high yield of 631.34 kg per mu, for the first time exceeding the yield of 500 kg per mu.

Located on the North China Plain, Hebei is a major wheat production base for China. But the water-consuming grain has also contributed to the over-exploitation of the groundwater, forming the world's largest funnel-shaped aquifer.

Guo's research on breeding a water-conservation wheat variety started in the 1990s. After 20 years of effort, his team developed a series of water-saving wheat breeds. "The roots of the wheat can reach up to 2 meters below the soil surface, reducing the number of times it must be watered from six times to just once," said Guo.

The Malan Farm is now planted with about 1,000 wheat varieties. The farm has unified the application of water and fertilizer, pest control and field management, and the agronomists will be checking the condition of the wheat varieties in the field regularly, recording their growth and collecting data for future seed selection.

Guo and his colleagues participate in every process, including plowing, fertilizing, sowing and harvesting. Sometimes, they are so busy that they sleep only three hours a day.

"The efforts of a whole year would be wasted if anything went wrong with any of the processes," Guo said.

Local farmer Liu Manxin said: "After decades of toil in the field, Guo looks more like a farmer than we do. While others rush home when it starts raining, he will run to the farmland to check which seedlings are more resistant to being flattened."

The wheat seeds cultivated by the Malan Farm have been used in Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and other provinces, covering a total area of 25.3 million hectares, increasing yields by over 10 million tonnes and saving over 12.5 billion cubic meters of water, experts have estimated.

According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, the country's independently developed varieties occupy more than 95 percent of the total crop planting area.

Guo has no plans to retire.

"I'm a son of farmers," he said. "I won't leave the farmland that I have loved all my life." Enditem

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