Abstract: The present invention discloses a specific primer ZMEH_1 for identifying or assisting in identifying the heading date of rice materials and use thereof, and a breeding method of rice cultivars with early-heading without yield drag. The ZMEH_1 is a pair of PCR primers corresponding to the upstream and downstream of the fragment with sequence variation 1 of the rice Os03g0122600 gene between the late- heading parent MH63 and the early-heading parent DEH229. ZMEH_1 can explain about 86.0% of the phenotypic variation of the progeny from the MH63/DEH229 population, which meets the needs of industrial applications. DEH229 has the characteristic of early-heading without yield drag, and its progenies derived from various rice cultivars all continue to have the characteristic of early-heading without yield drag.