Research On Huang Ruicai And Development Of Modern Soil Science In China

Huang Ruicai(1907-1998),a tenured professor and doctoral supervisor of Nanjing Agricultural University,is a famous soil scientist,agricultural educator and one of the founders of modern soil science in China.He dedicated his entire life to scientific research on soil and talent cultivation,which is of great significance to the development of China’s modern soil science.Huang Ruicai’s family condition was superior.Therefore,he received the complete Western enlightenment education by which he laid a solid English foundation and developed favorable learning habits.During his university years,due to the deteriorated economic situation of his family,he had to drop out of school.He then went to Guangdong province to join the the Northern Expedition for his childhood dream was to join the army.However,the corruption of Kuomindao disappointed him and he returned to school.During this period,Huang’s though experienced the change from "joining the army to safeguard homeland" to"saving the nation by science".After University of Nanjing moved to Sichuan province,in order to support agricultural production,Huang Ruicai conducted investigation and research on conservation of water and soil in Sichuan Basin for more than 10 years.In 1943,Huang Ruicai joined the Construction Delegation of Five Provinces in Northwest China and was responsible for investigation of forest resources.There he collected a large quantity of the first-hand information and proposed extremely valuable forestry management schemes.Since the establishment of People’s Republic of China,Huang Ruicai had started to devote to investigation on soil of Jiangsu province and made great contribution to Jiangsu Province Wasteland Soil Investigation,Generalized Soil Survey in 7 Regions,the First Soil General Survey and the Second Soil General Survey.In the 1960s,Huang Ruicai applied soil microbiology into the research of bubble turned upland rice in Lixiahe area and successfully improved poor single-season waterlogged field to high yield wheat-rice double cropping farmland.After the reform and opening-up,Huang Ruicai wrote papers to further popularize soil micromorphology,added experimental apparatus and set soil micromorphology courses for graduate students.In 1979,Huang Ruicai took the lead in vertisol research and proved that the vertisol of China was mainly distributed in the shajiang black soil areas of Henan,Anhui,Shandong,Jiangsu and Hubei provinces and in the basalt platform of Hainan province,Leizhou Peninsula and southeast Fujian as well as in Guangxi and Yunnan.Since the 1980s,he had offered soil ecology courses in Nanjing Agricultural University and built the first batch of farmland ecology laboratories in China,which led to a boom in soil ecology research in China.Afterwards,Huang Ruicai carried on research on origin of albic soil firstly utilizing thermoluminescence spectroscopy of quartz particle surface in China proving the formation cause of albic soil in Huaibei and Northeast China areas.Huang Ruicai had been engaged in soil science teaching for more than 60 years.Under his leadership,the Soil Chemistry Department of Nanjing Agricultural University was early approved to award master’s and doctoral degrees in soil science,actively organized and launched the training activities for agrochemistry,general survey of soil and remote sensing technology in the 1970s and 1980s,and continuously conveyed technical force in soil agrochemistry for agricultural development of China.Soil Science Society of China and Farmland Ecology Laboratory of Nanjing Agricultural University created by Huang Ruicai have been inherited and carried forward by his students and become one of the important academic institutions in the contemporary academic circle of soil.His spirit of soil science motivates the new generation of young soil scholars to make due contribution to the development of soil science in China.Huang Ruicai spent 70 years to build a bridge for soil academic circle of China to the world and made a foundational contribution to the development of soil science in China.