Henan cracked cotton soilless seedling transplanting technology

After more than 10 years of painstaking exploration, the technological problem that has plagued China's cotton cultivation field for nearly half a century—plant plantless seedling transplanting, was cracked by researchers of the Cotton Oil Research Institute of Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and successfully applied to Datian production.
Recently, this technology passed the expert appraisal organized by relevant departments. Experts participating in the appraisal conference believe that this technology is a major technological innovation and breakthrough in the field of cotton cultivation, which will have a major impact on promoting the industrialization, scale, and modernization of cotton in China.
Cotton is not only an important strategic material, but also an important pillar industry in rural Henan. Transplanting with seedlings of nutritional pots is the main form of planting. At present, there are 8 million mu of transplanted area for breeding seedlings in Henan Province and about 30 million mu in China. However, this method not only requires more work, but also has a higher labor intensity and higher investment. Since the 1960s, several scientific research units have successively explored soilless seedling transplanting of cotton, but they have not been successfully applied to field production.
The Institute of Cotton Oils, Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences started the research on soilless seedling transplanting in cotton factories in 1992. After more than 10 years of painstaking exploration, it has basically broken through the technical difficulties in transplanting cotton without soil. Since 2002, the production demonstration has started. In 2003, the demonstration area reached 4200 mu, and the transplanting survival rate reached more than 95%, and there were a number of high-yielding fields where the seed cotton was expected to reach more than 350 kg per mu.
According to Yang Tiegang of the research group, this technology uses a specially formulated nutrient solution and a rapid rooting agent to not only ensure that the roots of the cotton seedlings remain basically intact after transplanting, but also that they can quickly adapt to the environment and issue new roots after transplanting. Compared with the traditional transplanting of nutritious quail seedlings, the use of a new factory soilless seedling transplanting technology not only can reduce the labor intensity and labor cost of cotton farmers, but also can reduce the seedling raising cost by about 20%.