"The man who fed us was gone," said Yang Naimei, Secretary of the Communist Party of China Changhong Village Committee, Shiwan Town, Dazu District, in tears.

Yuan Longping, the "Father of Hybrid Rice" who passed away on Saturday at 91, will be long remembered as one of the "most laudable leaders" who helped feed the world, said the World Food Prize Foundation, which honored the Chinese scientist 17 years ago.

Yuan Longping, the "Father of Hybrid Rice" who passed away on Saturday at 91. (Photo provided to iChongqing)

In 1952, Yuan was studying at Southwest Agriculture College (currently Southwest University), during which he came to Youting Town, Dazu District, for land reform and lived with local villagers for three months.

Yuan once said, "I studied in Chongqing for many years. Dazu was my first workplace, where my career started. I was deeply attached to this land and I cared about its development."

In July 2018, Yuan accepted the offer of General Counsel for Modern Agricultural Development from Dazu. He was excited to hear that "ratoon rice", "double-thousand rice fields", which refer to the fields with a per-mu (0.07 hectares) yield of over 1,000 jin of grain that can generate over 1,000 yuan (about 155.3 U.S. dollars), and "water tank wheat" became the three signatures of Dazu in the 1990s.

Among them, the "double-thousand rice fields" was given the first prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award.

Yuan assigned Ma Guohui, Party Secretary of National Hybrid Rice R&D Center, to be responsible for the establishment of Yuan Longping Chongqing Academician and Expert Workstation and Yuan Longping Hybrid Rice Science Popularization Exhibition Hall in Dazu.

In January 2019, Yuan Longping gave seeds of Chaoyou 1000, a promising super hybrid rice combination, to Shiwan Town for trial planting, which succeeded.

On August 29 of the same year, experts from Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences concluded that the test field yielded 903.9 kg per mu (about 63.3 kg per hectare).

The 66.7-ha Chongqing Longping Colorful Countryside Scenic Area has become an agricultural tourism complex integrating science popularization and study tour, innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as sightseeing.