Color, plumpness, weight and quality. Wheat seeds are carefully inspected in a testing room on the Malan Farm in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province.

"Seed selection is a little like an exam. The top candidates most suitable for planting only appear after thousands of rounds of testing," said Pan Yuheng, the person in charge of the process.

The Malan No. 1 wheat variety yielded a record 12,956.4 kilograms per hectare this year thanks to its additional resistance to cold and disease, in Yanli village in Xingtai city, Hebei.

Agronomists are on the front line of farming. Before the onset of last winter, approximately 16,000 agricultural technicians were sent to work alongside farmers to ensure the green wheat shoots were able to survive the cold.

Their efforts were not in vain. Hebei's total summer grain output was 14.87 million metric tons this year.

As one of the country's major grain-producing provinces, Hebei created 14 seed-breeding innovation teams between 2016 and 2020. In the 2021-25 period, the province aims to raise that number to 20 and create a number of high-performance seed varieties to which they own the intellectual property rights, according to provincial agricultural authorities.

In addition to quality seeds, the use of techniques such as Beidou navigation combined with drip irrigation also helps guarantee water and fertilizer conservation and higher yields, according to Jia Xiuling, a researcher at the Hebei Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences.

With an emphasis on developing its seed industry as one of its agriculture priorities, China currently has 216 national seed breeding and production centers, according to official data from April.

Editor: Song Lifang