The department of agronomy aims to train students’ ability to improve crop yield and quality, ensure food security and develop sustainable agriculture. In response to global climate change, our department actively combines research on crop physiology, crop breeding, crop cultivation, biotechnology and bioinformation. We study agricultural ecology and new cultivation models, and keep working hard with the selection and improvement of stress-tolerant food crops. To be more specific, our department’s teaching fields include: (1) crop production (2) crop physiology and technology (3) genetics and molecular breeding (4)biometry and bioinformation, including basics courses (first year and second year), common core courses, professional core courses and integrated courses (third year and fourth year), and elective courses. Under the curriculum mapping of the department, undergraduate students will gain exposure to the above four fields in the freshman and sophomore courses, and they will specialize in different fields in junior and senior year according to their interests. The master and PhD students are divided into the division of crop science and division of biometry and bioinformation.
The four directions of the curriculum map are as follows:
Production management: Mainly focusing on modern cultivation technology, farmland management, conservation, seed, seedling technology, and intelligent agriculture.
Biotechnology: As the basis for crop cultivation, management and breeding improvement, mainly focusing on application of biotechnology, understanding of crop growth and development, form and function, adaptability to environment, crop yield and quality components, etc.
Biometry and bioinformation: Mainly focusing on big data analysis such as design of experiments, data collection and management, statistical analysis, genomics and bioinformation, and intelligent agriculture.
In order to connect international agriculture research and assist our students to learn, we take international agricultural related universities as reference. The department establishes different specialization fields. The establishment can be flexible to add new fields or reorganize old fields into new fields, which is a suitable way to adjust teaching flexibility in response to social or industrial needs. Currently, we have seven specializations: (1) crop science specialization (2) crop biotechnology specialization (3) crop genome specialization (4) crop breeding specialization (5) applied biological statistics specialization (6) statistical genetics specialization (7) experimental design specialization.
Our future direction: (1) Based on technological, ecological farmland management and crop cultivation technology, we aim to launch a new era of “sustainable agriculture”, “organic agriculture”, and “intelligent agriculture”(2)Transgene engineering technology and agricultural biotechnology (3) Utilizing molecular biotechnology to study the physiological regulation mechanism of crop stress (4) Crop genetic diversity research (5) New molecular breeding technology and methods (6) Big data analysis of intelligent agriculture (7) In response to WTO regulations, we aim to adapt to the free competition in the environment, strengthen the exploration and development of local high-quality special cash crops (8) Management of intellectual property rights of seeds and seedlings.