As a major agricultural country, China is also one of the world’s most abundant sources of crop straw, with production expected to reach 900 million tons by 2025. As an agricultural by-product, straw has been widely regarded as a potential renewable resource. It is rich in organic matter and essential nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K), playing a critical role in global carbon and nitrogen cycles, agricultural productivity, and green environmental development. The efficient and rational utilization of straw can not only meet the resource demands supporting economic growth but also contribute to environmental protection and sustainable social development in China. By closely integrating comprehensive straw utilization with the annual key tasks of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, the focus remains on prioritizing agricultural applications while adopting diversified measures. The efforts aim to improve straw utilization methods, strengthen technological support, explore replicable and sustainable industrial development models, and establish efficient utilization mechanisms to enhance the quality of agricultural straw use. To fully leverage the agricultural potential of straw, numerous technologies and equipment for straw utilization in agriculture have been developed in recent years, including straw harvesting and collecting equipment, straw crushing and returning-to-field equipment, full-straw seeding anti-clogging technology, combined straw and green manure returning-to-field equipment, and specialized straw seedling-raising equipment. Nevertheless, many challenges remain to be addressed, including bridging the equipment gap in mechanized processing, overcoming technical bottlenecks in resource conversion, and filling the lack of agronomy-adapted technologies. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive and critical analysis of present straw utilization technology and equipment in agriculture, discussing their potential benefits, limitations, and challenges, as well as future prospects and directions. This study provides insights from the perspective of key technologies and equipment to strengthen technological research, enhance straw’s agricultural potential, and explore green circular economy models in agriculture. By leveraging innovation in science and technology, it aims to ensure food security and improve grain production capacity.

Against the backdrop of global population growth, intensifying climate change, and limited arable land, ensuring food security and promoting sustainable agriculture have become critical issues. The limitations of conventional agricultural systems are becoming increasingly apparent, creating an urgent need for innovation driven by science and technology. In this context, plant multi-omics technologies serve as the foundational data and technical cornerstone of systems biology and precision agriculture. Integrating multi-level data from genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, and microbiomics offers substantial advantages for systematically understanding and improving plants. Unlike previous reviews that mainly catalog omics technologies or focus on individual crops, this review adopts a unified discovery-to-translation framework and critically evaluates the strength of evidence across applications. This review focuses on cutting-edge applications of multi-omics in three key areas: improving the traits of cereal crops (rice, wheat and maize), remediating soil health, and innovating products such as biofertilizers and biostimulants for agriculture. We systematically explore the roles of multi-omics in accelerating breeding processes, deciphering complex agronomic traits, restoring soil ecosystems, and constructing intelligent decision-support systems. The review also examines current challenges, including the complexity of data integration and the difficulties of predicting genotype-by-environment interactions. Furthermore, it outlines future directions involving deeper convergence with artificial intelligence, high-throughput phenomics, and digital twins. In summary, plant multi-omics technology is a vital tool for unravelling the mysteries of plant life and is also a key enabler of intelligent, precise and sustainable agricultural transformation.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) generates approximately 300 million tons of straw annually worldwide, and efficient degradation and valorization remain critical bottlenecks for sustainable agriculture. Straw degradability is fundamentally constrained by cell wall recalcitrance, which is determined by the composition and architecture of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, each under genetic regulation. This review proposes a three-parameter analytical framework, including cellulose crystallinity, hemicellulose side-chain modification, and lignin monomer composition and cross-linking density, to systematically assess the regulatory role of endogenous rice genes in straw degradability. We provide a comprehensive synthesis of recent advances in cellulose synthase genes and brittle culm mutants, lignin biosynthesis, cell wall modification genes, and the integration of genetic mapping with molecular breeding strategies. Particular attention is given to the trade-offs between enhanced degradability and agronomic performance, and to emerging strategies, including semi-dominant alleles, tissue-specific promoters, and multi-gene pyramiding, which hold potential for resolving these trade-offs. We conclude by identifying key research gaps and proposing future directions for developing dual-purpose rice cultivars with both high grain yield and superior straw degradability.