Record soybean varieties and bio-coupling: an academician’s field visit in Tianmen
At OCRI’s June 2025 soybean seminar in Tianmen, an academician and other experts toured record-setting Zhongdou varieties and a 10,000-mu bio-coupling demonstration — the coupling science our Orvan™ range delivers, now applied across 18 provinces with an average gain of +15%.
On 30 June 2025, the Oil Crops Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (OCRI-CAAS) held a soybean science seminar in Tianmen, Hubei. An academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Nanjing Agricultural University, together with other experts, toured OCRI’s new soybean variety demonstration fields in Huangtan and the core area of a 10,000-mu bio-coupling inoculant demonstration. They agreed that scaling up the integrated package of new Zhongdou-series varieties and supporting technologies is important for improving soybean quality, returns and large-area yield.
Soybean as a national priority
Soybean is a strategic grain, oil and feed crop for China, and raising its output is a national goal — that year’s central “No. 1 Document” called for large-area yield improvement in soybean and other oil crops. Against that backdrop, OCRI built model fields that put new varieties and new technologies at the centre of an integrated, systematic demonstration.
Record-setting varieties, shown alongside the bio-coupling
OCRI’s Zhongdou series was on show, and two of its lines hold southern high-yield records. The demonstration paired these elite varieties with the bio-coupling technology — variety and biology working together.
OCRI Zhongdou-series soybean varieties on show at the Tianmen seminar
| OCRI soybean variety | Standout result | Notable for |
|---|---|---|
| Zhongdou 63 | 344.3 kg/mu — a southern soybean high-yield record (Tianmen, 2023) | Yangtze basin · Huang-Huai-Hai · SW mountains |
| Zhongdou 57 | 276.1 kg/mu at 10,000-mu scale, through a season of extreme heat (Gong’an, 2024) | Heat resilience |
| Zhongdou 62 / 81 | Protein 49.34% / 47.04% | High protein — for soy-food processing |
| You 6019 / Zhongdou 79 | Oil 22.55% / 23.54%; yield >10% over the check | High-oil · disease- and density-tolerant |
The technology underneath: bio-coupling
The demonstration fields use the bio-coupling technology first developed at OCRI — an approach designed to improve soybean quality and nitrogen fixation while reducing fertiliser use and raising yield, tackling two long-standing international problems at once. It has been deployed at scale across China’s four major soybean regions: 174 demonstration sites in 18 provinces, from 100-mu plots and 1,000-mu blocks to 10,000- and 100,000-mu tracts, with an average gain of 15%. Tianmen’s agricultural authorities expect the combination of the new varieties and bio-coupling to raise yield and returns by more than 15%.
Orvan™: technical background
The bio-coupling at the centre of this work is the same Aspergillus–Rhizobia Coupling our Orvan™ range is built to deliver commercially. A programme measured this widely — across provinces, scales and seasons, and reported in the national science press — is the kind of validation that stands behind the product we bring to growers.