Iron is an important micro-nutrient to human health. Malnutrition of iron is a serious problem associated with resource poor population of many developing countries. Development and consumption of iron-rich rice varieties are considered one of the ways to solve the problem. To facilitate large-scale screening of breeding materials for iron concentration in the rice iron-biofortified breeding program of China, we developed a new method “surging and grind-milling of orthophenanthroline colorimetry testing” (SGOC). Based on the testing results of 3 sets of 84 diverse rice genotypes that differ greatly in grain iron concentration, the correlation coefficient was as high as 0.87 between the SGOC method and the standard ICP-MS testing method. The per sample cost of the SGOC method was about 0.1$, or 50 times less the ICP-MS method, indicating that the SGOC method is a robust, fast and cost-effective, particularly useful for preliminary screening of the iron concentration of large numbers of early generation breeding materials. Our results demonstrated that milling and polishing with iron-made equipment tended to significantly increase the iron concentration of processed rice, which was also eliminated in the SGOC method. Finally, our results on the 59 BC progeny indicate that introgression of genes/ QTLs for high iron concentration from high iron rice germsperm into elite local rice varieties is an efficient way to develop high yielding rice varieties with significantly improved rice iron concentration in future rice biofortified breeding.