The School of Agriculture (SA), one of the oldest schools in the university, traces its history back to the Department of Agriculture founded in 1935, and was renamed the School of Agriculture in 2004.
It has five departments (Department of Agronomy, Department of Crop Genetic Breeding, Department of Seed Science & Engineering, Department of Practaculture Science and Department of Tobacco Production), one teaching and experiment center, and several functional labs. SA provides four undergraduate programs (agronomy, tobacco production, practaculture science and seed science and engineering), six master’s degree programs (crop genetic breeding, crop cultivation and farming, safe production of crop, agricultural mechanization, regional development of agriculture, information-based agriculture) and one doctoral degree program (crop science).
The school has a proficient and competent team of teaching and research staff with 51 faculty members, including 12 professors and 21 associate professors. It enrolls 800 undergraduates and 120 postgraduates (including 20 PhD candidates).
SA undertakes more than 30 different projects from the National Natural Sciences Foundation, “863” Program, Supporting Plan, Technological Project for Bump Harvest of Grain Production. It has received many awards, including second prize for national and provincial teaching achievement, first prize from the Ministry of Agriculture, and prizes from Anhui Provincial Science & Technology.
In recent years, SA has thoroughly researched for wheat, rice, corn, oil seeds, cotton, soybeans, tobacco, grass and tawn, and mainly focuses on studying genetic crop breeding, crop cultivation and farming coupled with seed science. What we attach great importance to are genetic breeding, cultivation physiology, quality improvement as well as seed science and technology for wheat, rice, cotton and oilseed. Project teams which respectively study wheat, rice and soybean breeding successively cultivate several superior varieties, making great contributions to agricultural production in Anhui.
In terms of scientific researche, our faculty have conducted enormous studies and achieved a certain success. For instance, research about high/low molecular weight glutenin subunit, grain PPO activity, grain hardness, tolerance to preharvest sprouting, starch quality and glutinous variation, pentosan, the activity of lipoxygenase, marker-assisted selection (MAS) and wheat cultivation physiology are of significance in China. In addition, they also conduct relatively in-depth studies in breeding and cultivation of rice and cotton, cultivation physiology of oilseed and tobacco, as well as selection of high quality soybean seeds.
