これは水田から掘り出したイネ根系です。左から、食用水稲のコシヒカリ、飼料用水稲のクサノホシとたちすずかです。各品種332株を掘り出してきたので、飼料用水稲の根系の大きさを直感的に理解できます。収穫後の飼料用水稲の根系が多量の有機物と養分を土壌へ供給する可能性に期待が膨らみます。

一連の作業をタンザニアからの留学生と彼らのチューターである学部3年生が担ってくれています。

This photo shows rice roots uprooted from our long-term experimental fields. There are Koshihikari the most popular and extensively grown cultivar in Japan on your left, Kusanohoshi one of the fodder rice (cattle feeding) cultivar with large panicles on the middle, and Tachisuzuka another fodder rice cultivar with extremely small panicles (harvest index is about 10%!!) on your right. Roots of each cultivar were uprooted from the same number of hills (332 hills). You can imagine how big root systems of fodder rice cultivars are. Those roots are expected to supply a large amount of organic matter and nutrients to soils.

This hard work was done by two Tanzanian students who recently joined our lab and their student tutors.