Published : 2025-02-24
On February 24, 2020, Jiang Yiyuan (蔣亦元), a renowned Chinese agricultural engineer, agricultural educator, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and professor at Northeast Agricultural University, passed away in Harbin due to illness at the age of 92.
Throughout his life, Jiang dedicated himself to the research of agricultural equipment. He emphasised independent innovation by integrating agricultural machinery and agronomy.
In the 1980s, he led a team to create a new system, solving the international issues of "high grain shattering loss" and "inability to harvest severely lodged rice." This accomplished the world's first technological breakthrough of simultaneously threshing grains and harvesting green rice straw as silage.
Experts at home and abroad unanimously recognised this achievement, considering it a major development benefiting rice farmers. Jiang Yiyuan was thus awarded the second prize of the National Technological Invention Award (the highest award in the field of agricultural engineering since the founding of New China).
Additionally, in his research on similar theories, Jiang pointed out a significant defect in the synthesis theory of academic authority G. Murphy's π relation, which stated that "the component equations must have the same form."
He was the first to propose and prove the conclusion that "component equations can have different forms," significantly enhancing its predictive accuracy.
Jiang Yiyuan cultivated a large number of outstanding talents and researchers in agriculture for the nation.
He was honoured within the industry as a "virtuous and skilful, giant in agricultural machinery." Jiang Yiyuan's passing is considered a significant loss to China's agricultural engineering and education fields.
