New platform is China’s latest effort to improve home-grown soybean varieties and reduce reliance on imports Chinese agricultural scientists have launched a generative AI breeding platform for soybeans, which play a central role in China’s agricultural trade.
The Fengshu 2.0 platform marked “a shift in China’s soybean breeding towards data-assisted breeding and precision decision-making”, Xinhua reported recently, contrasting it with traditional methods that relied on experience and a trial-and-error approach.
The artificial intelligence platform, which is expected to optimise breeding plans by making the processing of research data more efficient, is China’s latest effort to improve home-grown soybean varieties as it seeks to reduce its reliance on imports.
The past five years have seen Chinese scientists develop a batch of breakthrough high-yield, high-oil varieties of the seed plant to replace imports, which currently account for over 80 per cent of total consumption, according to official numbers, and are seen by Beijing as a vulnerability amid heightened geopolitical risks.
growing demand for meatfrom the nation’s 1.4 billion people kept pushing up the consumption of soybean meal – a key animal feed.
seed industry revitalisation planin 2021, the development of high-yield, high-oil soybean varieties had transitioned from “quantitative accumulation” to “qualitative breakthrough”, said Wang Wenshen, an analyst at bulk commodity consultancy Sublime China Information.