The Father of the Green Revolution: How agronomist Norman Borlaug fed and saved the world
Life can sometimes imitate art. Noel Vietmeyer’s Our Daily Bread, a gripping, touching, meticulously researched biography of Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder known as the Father of the Green Revolution, accurately portrays the kind of nobility, idealism and courage epitomized by Jimmy Stewart in the title role of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and Gary Cooper in “High Noon.”
Borlaug’s life was one of extraordinary paradoxes: He was a child of the Iowa prairie during the Great Depression who worked on the family farm, attended a one-room school, flunked the university entrance exam—but went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work that ultimately prevented worldwide malnutrition, famine, and the premature death of hundreds of millions. (That was at a time when the award was more than a mere exercise in political correctness.)
Borlaug introduced several revolutionary innovations into plant breeding and agronomics. First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest; this raised yields 20 to 40 percent.
Second, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties, which were smaller than the old shoulder-high varieties that bent in the wind and touched the ground (thereby becoming unharvestable); the new waist or knee-high dwarfs stayed erect and held up huge loads of grain. The yields were thereby boosted even further.
Third, he devised an ingenious technique called “shuttle breeding”—growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico. The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the time required for breeding new varieties. Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting new early-maturing, rust-resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes, and soil types. This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed.
Without Borlaug’s high-yield agriculture, millions would have starved.
Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide their farmers both improved seeds and the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation. Borlaug liked to recall one strategy that he used:
Whenever I reached New Delhi the first question I was asked was: “How are the Mexican wheats doing in Pakistan?” And whenever I reached Lahore the first question was: “How is India doing with the new varieties?”
To each I always answered the same: “They are doing very well, very well indeed. You are going to have to work as hard as you can just to keep up with them.”
In his professional life, Borlaug, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, struggled against prodigious obstacles, including what he called the “constant pessimism and scare-mongering” of critics and skeptics who predicted that, in spite of his efforts, mass starvation was inevitable and hundreds of millions would perish in Africa and Asia. His work resulted not only in the construction of high-yielding varieties of wheat but also in new agronomic and management practices that transformed the ability of Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations.
