BAHAWALPUR: Maize-soybean strip intercropping technology, an advanced Chinese agricultural technology created high yield of both crops while not occupying extra land, finished its first-phase sowing on 30-acre land of Pakistan.
Once the second phase completes in March, this spring the total area of demonstration plots will reach 100 acres, making a giant leap of about 270.4% in comparison with last season’s area.
“In the last one and half months, we traveled 18,000 km across the country to complete sowing. Until now we have demonstrated our technology on 30 acres of land, and in March 70 more acres of land will be sown with soybean varieties from China,” said Muhammad Ali Raza, the post-doc from Sichuan Agricultural University who is promoting the Chinese agricultural technology under Prof.
Yang Wenyu and Yang Feng’s support and guidance together with Muhammad Hayder Bin Khalid, another post-doc from the same university.
This season the team has built larger-scale cooperation especially with universities, institutes and local farmers. Four universities, i.e. Sindh Agricultural University, Tandojam, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, and PMAS-Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, and Nuclear Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering (NIBGE), Faisalabad have joined this season’s demonstration. Moreover, the technology has applied to five farmers’ fields in Sindh and Punjab. Distributed in Hyderabad, Tandojam, Nawabshah, Bahawalpur, Vehari, Multan, Faisalabad, and Chakwal, etc., the aggregated area of the demonstration plots has touched 30 acres of land.
Besides the massively expanded demonstration area, another breakthrough for this season is that some high-yielding soybean varieties from China will arrive Pakistan in the coming month.
Then 70 acres of land at Muzaffar Abad and Okara will be sown with those varieties, which are separately provided by NIBGE and Nizami Industries. – Agencies
