I See through Everything

After seeing off the group from Yang Hejun, Jiang Miao returned to his normal daily routine.

His day began at 7:00 AM with a run with Shuya, followed by breakfast at 8:00. From 8:30 to 11:30 AM, he was in the lab doing research.

His midday break, from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM, was for lunch and meetings with company executives to discuss business.

He returned to the lab from 2:30 to 5:30 PM to continue his experiments.

The evening, from 5:30 to 7:30, was for dinner, a walk with his parents, Shuya, and others, and then a shower.

From 7:30 to 8:30 PM, he would retreat to his private computer room to browse global news, gathering useful information or content closely related to his interests.

He spent 8:30 to 11:30 PM studying various subjects to keep his knowledge sharp.

Finally, from 11:30 PM to midnight, he would get ready for bed. Sleep and rest lasted from midnight until 7:00 AM.

This was Jiang Miao’s unremarkable daily life, with a schedule packed to the brim.

After developing new varieties of strawberries, Ginseng Fruit, tomatoes, oil-seed camellia, bananas, soybeans, and alfalfa, Jiang Miao didn’t stop.

Starting in November, he expanded his research from soybeans to include two new crops, both of which were common in the Lingnan Region.

His research on soybeans was still ongoing.

The newly added crops were cassava and sugarcane.

For his cassava breeding research, Jiang Miao’s focus wasn’t on yield. This was mainly because cassava breeding, both domestically and internationally, had already made great strides in that area.

The yield of ordinary cassava varieties was between 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms per mu. With good management, this could be increased to about 5,000 kilograms.

By observing cassava’s relevant gene sequences and understanding the genetic principles of plant growth, Jiang Miao knew that the maximum potential yield for cassava was around 9,300 to 9,500 kilograms per mu.

This maximum yield was impossible to achieve under open-field conditions, regardless of breeding methods. It required smart greenhouses with specific nutrient-rich soil and solutions.

In an open-field environment, 6,000 kilograms was the practical limit for cassava.

Therefore, in terms of yield-focused breeding, cassava’s potential had been exhausted.

Jiang Miao’s breeding focus was on non-toxicity and starch type.

The non-toxic approach was, in fact, a long-standing topic in the field of cassava breeding. Current cassava varieties developed through traditional techniques could generally achieve low to trace toxicity. However, moderately and highly toxic varieties still occupied a significant cultivation area, primarily because differences in yield and application allowed many of them to persist.

Jiang Miao’s idea, however, was to cultivate a completely non-toxic variety, requiring not only the tubers to be non-toxic but the stems and leaves as well.

The purpose of this research direction was to reduce the processing costs for both the cassava tubers and their foliage, as well as to simplify the cooking process for the average person.

Of course, this alone was not enough.

This was where another research direction became necessary to increase cassava’s overall value: studying the type, proportion, and granule size of its starch.

Under normal circumstances, cassava starch is composed of about 17% to 20% amylose and 80% to 83% amylopectin, and it is classified as a small-granule starch.

In fact, the big three of root and tuber starches—cassava, sweet potato, and potato—each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Cassava starch: low amylose, high amylopectin, small granules.

Sweet potato starch: low amylose, high amylopectin, large granules.

Potato starch: medium amylose, high amylopectin, large and irregular granules.

Compared to cereal starches, which are generally medium-amylose, high-amylopectin, and small-granule, root and tuber starches have their own pros and cons.

Cassava starch, in particular, has limited direct applications when used alone. It’s primarily used to make the pearls in Pearl milk tea or mixed with other starches to produce noodles; there are very few finished products made from it exclusively.

This leads to a relatively narrow range of applications for cassava starch. Coupled with massive global production capacity, its market price is generally lower than other starches.

In the domestic market, sweet potato starch averages around 5,500 yuan per ton, while cassava starch is only about 4,000 yuan per ton. It is, however, more valuable than wheat flour, which goes for about 3,000 yuan per ton.

The problem is that the residue left after starch extraction from cassava lacks a corresponding industry to absorb it and can only be used as animal feed or fertilizer.

Domestically, cassava starch production capacity has been decreasing year by year because the overall profit margin for cassava is too low. Neither farmers nor manufacturers have much enthusiasm for the industry.

The breeding direction Jiang Miao was considering, therefore, was geared toward making cassava more suitable as animal feed.

Whether it was achieving non-toxicity, altering the starch composition, increasing protein content, or even changing the amino acid profile of its protein—all these goals were aimed at making cassava a viable animal feed.

The process was on its second generation of seedlings induced by tissue culture.

In addition, Jiang Miao was attempting to leverage genetic principles, using specific gene-targeting inhibitors to turn certain dominant genes into recessive ones.

The principle behind this technology was based on the evolutionary trait of "use it or lose it." By directionally inhibiting the function of certain gene fragments over successive generations of cultivation, the organism would naturally turn those suppressed genes into recessive ones.

Conversely, this technique could also be used to continuously activate certain gene fragments, thereby making them dominant.

Using this technology, combined with continuously induced genetic mutations, he had obtained 76 varieties of cassava that were completely non-toxic throughout the entire plant in just two generations.