Saline-alkali Land

After leaving Shu Ya's Temporary Laboratory.

Jiang Miao went alone to his own experimental greenhouse.

Ke Yong and another bodyguard sat beneath a sunshade not far away. They appeared relaxed, but they were secretly watching the surroundings vigilantly, especially the nearby paths leading to the laboratory and experimental greenhouse.

At the next sunshade over sat Li Wenna and another female bodyguard, who belonged to Shu Ya's group.

Li Wenna sat at the table, occasionally tapping away at her laptop keyboard as she handled some work.

Although she was Shu Ya's secretary, she still had to help the farm deal with certain matters. In particular, Lu Weibin had entrusted Li Wenna with communications with headquarters.

Jiang Miao inspected the various crops inside his private experimental greenhouse.

Quite a few crops had already been planted there.

They included Ginseng Fruit (Sweet Cucumber), alfalfa, soybeans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and rice.

The greenhouses had a total cultivated area of five mu.

The tomatoes, Ginseng Fruit, cucumbers, and soybeans had already flowered and borne fruit.

The alfalfa was growing exceptionally lush, while the rice was still heading.

He had transformed two mu of land into artificial saline-alkali land, divided into five types for simulating mildly saline-alkali land, moderately saline-alkali land, severely saline-alkali land, Marine Transgression Saline-alkali Land, and Inland Saline-alkali Land.

These saline-alkali experimental plots were planted with alfalfa, soybeans, and rice.

However, their growth conditions varied greatly.

Although Jiang Miao had developed these new varieties through the Appraisal Panel and breeding techniques, the new varieties could still struggle to adapt to local conditions.

To select suitable new varieties, he had used up a full three tons of non-GMO soybeans before picking out thirty-seven valuable mutated varieties from those three tons of genetically mutated soybean seeds.

The rice and alfalfa were the same.

Under traditional breeding methods, selecting useful varieties from three tons of mutated seeds would take at least several years.

Jiang Miao, however, could shorten that process to just a few weeks.

Only those preliminarily screened mutated varieties qualified to be used in planting trials.

The soybeans, alfalfa, and rice in these experimental fields were superior varieties painstakingly selected from tens of thousands of mutations.

"DD24 can't adapt to high potassium levels?" Jiang Miao noted the variety's condition in his record book using symbols and writing only he could understand.

After passing DD24's soybean test plot.

The next few soybean varieties all performed unsatisfactorily.

Some soybeans could tolerate saline-alkali conditions but not drought;

Some tolerated drought but not disease;

Others performed fairly well in other respects, but their yields were too low.

When he reached the experimental plot marked DD28, Jiang Miao crouched down and looked at the edamame pods hanging heavily beneath the branches. "DD28 is actually pretty good. It not only tolerates highly saline seawater, but also resists pests and diseases. Its stalks are relatively strong, it has good lodging resistance, and its yield is quite good too..."

He made a rough estimate of this soybean plant's yield. Converted into yield per mu, it could probably reach around 183 kilograms per mu.

That was an extremely high yield.

The management of this experimental plot was very extensive, and it had not received large amounts of fertilizer or pesticides. Reaching this yield level under such conditions was absolutely remarkable.

Of course, soybean yields in some domestic regions could also be very high.

For example, some soybean fields in the Western Regions Production and Construction Corps could yield around 230 kilograms per mu. But such yields required good field management, proper use of fertilizers and pesticides, and sound irrigation infrastructure.

Likewise, average yields in the GMO soybean-producing areas along America's Mississippi River could reach around 220 kilograms per mu.

The problem was that GMO soybeans involved concerns over seed-source security, genetic contamination, and safety sensitivity.

But DD28, which Jiang Miao had carefully selected, could be directly irrigated with seawater or saline water from inland lakes and still yield 183 kilograms per mu under extensive management. It was undoubtedly a variety with tremendous potential.

Unfortunately, DD28's cold resistance was not very good, and it could not withstand temperatures below fifteen degrees Celsius.

Jiang Miao was not disappointed by this, because it was only a first-generation variety. It could continue to be improved based on DD28, and he could even consider opening new experimental fields in the coastal saline-alkali land around Bohai Bay.

However, he had no plans to head north for the time being.

On one hand, he could not move too quickly. Last year, he had only just conquered artificial eel breeding technology, then developed several new strawberry varieties. If he unveiled such an outstanding soybean variety as well, it would easily attract attention.

On the other hand, Hai Lu Feng Company was not yet financially strong enough to make large-scale investments. If it launched a new soybean variety now, ordinary growers might not be willing to buy in, which would not be conducive to promotion.

After all, the new varieties Jiang Miao developed were all geared toward saline-alkali tolerance. For ordinary farmland, there was not actually much difference between planting saline-alkali-tolerant varieties and planting other varieties.

The alfalfa and rice he developed were likewise geared toward saline-alkali tolerance and drought resistance.

He had chosen saline-alkali tolerance and drought resistance because a large portion of the country's land consisted of saline-alkali land.

The country had 99.13 million hectares of saline-alkali land, equivalent to 1.48695 billion mu—nearly one mu of saline-alkali land per person.

Of that, 150 million mu of saline-alkali land had the potential for reclamation, which was also a direction many domestic agricultural research institutions were studying.

But easily reclaimable saline-alkali land was not Jiang Miao's target. What interested him was the remaining more than one billion mu of difficult-to-reclaim saline-alkali land. Saline-alkali-tolerant and drought-resistant varieties could be planted directly on such land without special soil improvement.

Even if only one-third of the saline-alkali land could be planted, it would be an extraordinarily significant breakthrough.

At its peak, the country's soybean imports from overseas amounted to only around 100 million tons.

As long as one-third of the saline-alkali land could be planted, the planting area could reach around 430 million mu. If all of it were planted with DD28, with a yield of 183 kilograms per mu, those 430 million mu of saline-alkali land could produce 78.69 million tons of soybeans.

Added to the country's existing soybean production capacity, that could almost completely replace imports.

Of course, completely replacing imports was impossible.

After all, if the country stopped importing entirely, the global soybean market would inevitably collapse overnight. It would not only be America's farmers who suffered enormous losses; farmers and agricultural companies in South American countries and Russia would also be dragged down.

What was more, without soybean imports, it would be difficult to reduce the trade surplus. That would make other countries even less willing to purchase domestic industrial products, pushing the global economy further toward isolation and trade protectionism.

Therefore, even if Jiang Miao introduced even better saline-alkali-tolerant soybeans, the planted area probably would not exceed 100 million mu.

If it exceeded that area, foreign soybean imports would have to be reduced by more than 20 million tons, which would inevitably mean cutting export quotas from certain regions.

Such an impact would trigger serious chain reactions.

Others could originally only rely on exporting agricultural products and minerals to make money. If another commodity import worth over 100 million tons annually was suddenly cut off, they would lose foreign exchange earnings and naturally have no money to import industrial products.

Under such circumstances, the authorities would consider the broader global economy. Jiang Miao's new soybean varieties would only become strategic reserve technology and would not be promoted for full-scale planting unless absolutely necessary.

They would probably first be planted across several tens of millions of mu, taking the opportunity to curb the arrogance of the Four Major Grain Merchants ABCD, suppress soybean prices, and then continue maintaining the scale of soybean imports.

There was no helping it. The country's industrial supply chain was too formidable, covering almost every type of industrial sector.

Under such circumstances, industrial products needed sufficient markets to absorb that capacity. Therefore, the scale of the trade surplus had to be carefully controlled to prevent other countries from becoming too poor.

Otherwise, with trade surpluses of billions or tens of billions every year, other countries were not America, capable of turning on a nuclear-powered money printer and flooding the market with currency. There would inevitably come a day when they could no longer endure it.

Maintaining the scale of imports was one means of balancing the trade surplus.