Ren Jizhou

Ren Jizhou, 95, a member of the Communist Party of China, is also a member of the China Engineering Academy and a professor at College of Pastoral Agriculture Science and Technology, Lanzhou University.

Ren specializes in pastoral agriculture teaching and research and is a strategic scientist in the pastoral agriculture field in China. He founded the steppe climate - land - vegetation comprehensive classification method, currently the only grassland classification system applicable in the whole world.

He proposed the grassland seasonal animal husbandry theory, which has been widely applied in pastoral areas and resulted in huge economic benefits. He founded the new index "animal product unit" for assessing grassland productivity, putting an end to the difficulty of comparing different animal by-products around the world, and the index has been adopted by leading international organizations. Ren also proposed a multi-dimension framework of the pratacultural science, which features three interfaces and four producing layers.

The temporal zonation, system coupling and system discordance theories that Ren proposed have opened up new areas of research in the pratacultural science. Ren is also among the first to study the agricultural ethics and agricultural system development history in China. He has 24 monographs to his credit including General Theory of Grassland Farming System, On Pastoral Agriculture Systems, Prataculture Dictionary, and History of China's Agriculture Systems. Ren has been honored with one second prize and two third prizes of National Science & Technology Progress Award, and one first prize at the ministerial and provincial level.

In 1999, he won the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation - Science & Technology Progress Award. In 2000, Ren was conferred the honorary title of "National Excellent Agriculture Science Worker" by the Ministry of Personnel of China and other ministries and commissions. In 2001, his "Construction of Disciplines Design and Talent Cultivation System for Pratacultural Science" won the National Teaching Achievement Special Prize in 2009, and Ren was praised as a model figure of addressing "Three Rural Issues" (agriculture, rural areas and farmers) at the 60th anniversary of the New China.

In 2010, Ren won the "Outstanding Merit Award" of the first Chinese Grassland Society. In 2011, he won the first "YouChange Poverty Alleviation Scientific Research Achievement Award" of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development. Despite the senior age of 95, Ren remained diligent in leading the writing of Agricultural Ethics, the first study on the laws and future of China's agricultural system development from the perspective of philosophy.