these are a bunch of sticky note collages i did for the animation guild’s post-it note fundraiser!! (i ended up keeping the first one haha! but the rest were sold in the show) i’d like to do more tiny paintings on sticky notes, these were super fun!!
China Plans to Feed 80 Million People With âSeawater Riceâ
Jinghai district in northern China is hardly a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the regionâs land is made of salty, alkaline soil where crops canât survive. Yet, last autumn, Jinghai produced 100 hectares of rice.
Known as âseawater riceâ because itâs grown in salty soil near the sea, the strains were created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice thatâs more resistant to saline and alkali. Test fields in Tianjinâthe municipality that encompasses Jinghaiârecorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for production of standard rice varieties.
China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s. But the term âseawater riceâ only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nationâs top agricultural scientist, began researching the idea in 2012.
Yuan, known as the âfather of hybrid rice,â is considered a national hero for boosting grain harvests and saving millions from hunger thanks to his work on high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s. In 2016, he selected six locations across the country with different soil conditions that were turned into testing fields for salt-tolerant rice. The following year, China established the research center in Qingdao where Wan works. The instituteâs goal is to harvest 30 million tons of rice using 6.7 million hectares of barren land.
Article goes on to speak about rising sea levels and how salt-tolerant rice will have big implications for coastline countries in the coming decades.
