Though you may not have heard of him, it is likely that you have been directly impacted by the life’s work of one Normal Borlaug? Sound familiar? Probably not. Yet this man made such an impact on the world that as a result of his efforts one of the major challenges facing world agriculture has been overcome. Not the ease at which rural farmers in third world countries can receive a farm loan, or the accessibly of farming, or better food storage techniques (though all of these are being addressed as we speak). Norman Borlaug gave the world good wheat.
It sounds simple and boring. Wheat… Bread is good right? But consider this. The wheat varieties that this man produced and work to spread throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, and India may have now saved over a billion people from starvation. It’s called the green revolution and it began during Borlaug’s time working at research positions in Mexico as a result of a joint venture between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. Norman was passionate about combining different lines of wheat in order to make a population-feeding super wheat. The practice at the time was to sew a wide variety of plant lines (or subspecies) each of which had different genes for disease resistance. Yet if you bread each variety over and over again, crossing it with one parent plant, you can eventual create a line with all the resistance you need—a high yield, fast growing, disease resistant super wheat that people the world over eat every day.
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