About Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences

Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences

The Tibet Academy of Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Sciences (TAAAS) is the agricultural and animal husbandry research academy of the Tibet Autonomous Region (Xizang), based in Lhasa. It is the region's principal public research institution for plateau farming and pastoralism, working on the crops and livestock on which Tibetan farmers and herders depend at altitudes where few other research systems operate. Its best-known work concerns highland barley — qingke, the staple grain of the Tibetan Plateau — and the yak, and it houses Tibet's first state key laboratory. The academy teaches farmers techniques such as highland barley cultivation across Tibet, develops new crop varieties and animal husbandry technologies, and conducts international cooperation on plateau agriculture.

Barley and yaks: the plateau staples at the centre of its work

Highland barley, known locally as nai, has been the most important crop and staple food ingredient in Tibet for thousands of years; it is traditionally milled into tsampa, roasted barley flour, and used in wine. The yak is equally central to pastoral livelihoods: the region's yak population passed five million head at the end of 2020 and yak meat output reached 227,800 metric tons that year. Tibet's crop output reached 1.03 million metric tons in 2020, 5.72 times the 1951 level, with highland barley output of 795,000 metric tons, 3.24 times the 1978 level. Research that raises the yield and reliability of these two staples therefore bears directly on regional food security, which is the context in which the academy works.

Tibet's first state key laboratory

Tibet's first state key laboratory was co-built by the regional government and the Ministry of Science and Technology to research highland barley and yaks on the plateau, bringing talent and funding to both subjects. The regional government committed to put in at least five million yuan (about $720,770) a year to fund the laboratory's research. Its director, Nyima Tashi, who also headed the academy, said the laboratory would safeguard Tibet's grain, focusing on exploring the genetics of barley and yaks in order to create better seeds, improve husbandry and increase grain and meat output. The laboratory had more than 70 researchers and aimed to become a top laboratory in China for plateau barley and yaks within five years of its establishment.

Sequencing the highland barley genome

In 2014 scientists of the academy, working with BGI Tech Solutions in Shenzhen, announced that they had sequenced the entire genome of highland barley — described as the world's first genetic map of the crop. The genome mapping project had been launched in 2012. Nyima Tashi, deputy dean of the Lhasa-based academy and chief scientist of the project, reported that the team had completed a draft sequence of an old barley variety native to the Tibetan Plateau, assembling 3.89 billion of the estimated 4.5 billion base pairs that make up highland barley DNA and identifying 39,197 protein-coding genes. The team expected the gene map to enable breeders to cultivate better varieties of the cereal and increase yields.

Nyima Tashi and the Zangqing 2000 variety

The academy's barley breeding programme is closely associated with Nyima Tashi, Tibet's chief scientist of highland barley breeding. Admitted to the agronomy department of Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Shaanxi in 1982, he became a researcher at the academy after graduating in 1985, began highland barley breeding work in 1989 — making detailed observations of more than 1,500 varieties provided by families across the region — and took a doctorate at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999. With his team he finalised the selective breeding of more than 20 new barley varieties, some of which became major choices in the region. The variety Zangqing 2000 came to be planted on 50 per cent of the land used for highland barley in Tibet, achieving output of 5,250 kilograms per hectare. Newer academy varieties have spread beyond Tibet and are sold in provinces including Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan. Nyima Tashi died at the age of 55 in a motor vehicle accident while travelling to an agricultural research centre in Ngari prefecture.

Structure: crop and livestock research institutes

Within the academy, crop and livestock work is organised through constituent institutes, among them the Tibet Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and the Tibet Livestock Research Institute (TLRI). An impact assessment by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) records TARI and TLRI as the academy's delivery institutes for crop–livestock projects in the region's crop–livestock zone, with outputs tailored to the lower-altitude prefectures of Shannan and Lhasa, at 3,500 to 3,700 metres, and to the higher altitudes of Xigaze, at 3,800 to 4,000 metres. The two institutes extended the outputs of ACIAR-funded research using participatory approaches and micro-extension techniques, and communicated project successes to farmers and herders.

Germplasm conservation and barley products

The academy is connected with the Qinghai–Xizang Plateau crop germplasm conservation system: it co-organised Qingke Industry Scientific and Technological Achievement events around the Qinghai–Xizang Plateau Crop Germplasm Repository, which preserves over 10,000 qingke (highland barley) accessions. Conservation of landrace diversity matters because those accessions are the raw material for breeding varieties adapted to plateau conditions. The academy has also worked on value-added uses of the crop: as of 2019 it had developed more than 100 barley-based products and created several well-known brands in Tibet, reflecting the nutritional profile of highland barley — rich in protein, fibre and vitamins, and low in fat and sugar — which suits a range of health food and beverage products.

Research across the academy's institutes

Published research from the academy's institutes illustrates the breadth of its work beyond breeding. Researchers of its Institute of Agricultural Product Quality Standard and Testing Research, for example, co-authored a 2021 study of the diversity of culturable bacteria in highland barley cultivation soil in Qamdo, in eastern Tibet: 830 individual bacterial strains were isolated from the soil at incubation temperatures of 4°C and 25°C using fifteen kinds of media, yielding 77 species in 42 genera across four phyla, with Actinobacteria predominant — work relevant to understanding the soil biology of the plateau's main cropland. Academy workers are also photographed in the field teaching local farmers to grow highland barley, for instance in Panam County of Shigatse, the prefecture known as the granary of Tibet.

Academy varieties remain a visible part of the plateau harvest. Reporting from Bainang County in Shigatse — a major grain production base — in September 2024 described farmers harvesting highland barley varieties developed with the assistance of the regional academy of agricultural and animal husbandry sciences, with the Zangqing 2000 variety in hand in the fields and the region's high-quality barley seed sold on to other provinces.

International cooperation

The academy has strengthened agricultural science and technology cooperation with Nepal and launched international cooperation and exchanges in farming and animal husbandry aimed at the sustainable development of both sectors in Tibet. Through such cooperation it introduced a batch of new agricultural varieties, developed new farming and animal husbandry technologies, and cultivated scientific and technological talent for the region. Its earlier collaboration with Australian-supported crop–livestock projects, delivered through TARI and TLRI, likewise brought participatory research methods into the region's farming systems. Partnerships of this kind connect the academy's plateau-specific knowledge — on qingke, yaks, Tibetan pigs and Tibetan sheep, and on husbandry at extreme altitude — with research systems facing comparable high-mountain conditions elsewhere in the Himalayan region and beyond.