SEEDS OF DOUBT

Can agricultural innovation outpace our growing appetites?

- BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT

The Green Revolution got off to a rocky start. In the fall of 1944, Norman Borlaug, who would become known as the revolution’s father, moved to Mexico to set up a plant-breeding program. Right away, he came down with a stomach crud. It was, he would later tell an interviewer, “the usual tourist thing,” except that it lasted for weeks. Though he had found his previous position, with DuPont, to be boring, in those weeks Borlaug decided that maybe it hadn't been so bad. “If I could have gotten my job back at DuPont, I would have,” he said.

Borlaug had gone to Mexico specifically to work with wheat, which was being devastated by a fungal disease called stem rust. When he got well enough to travel around the country, he became depressed by what he found. In the Bajío, a region northwest of Mexico City, the farmers were desperately poor. Their wheat didn't seem to grow so much as “fight to stay alive,” Borlaug wrote to his wife. “These places that I’ve seen have clubbed my mind.”

Borlaug threw himself into an effort to produce a new variety of wheat—one that would be both rust-resistant and higher-yielding. With the help of two Mexican agronomists, he gathered seeds from thousands of local varieties, planted them, and waited for them to mature. Most of the resulting plants succumbed to rust; the few that made it were crossed with one another to produce the next generation. To maximize his workdays, Borlaug often slept in a shack near his test fields, and, to speed up the breeding process, he shuttled between central Mexico, where wheat was grown in the summer, and northwestern Mexico, where he could get in a second crop in the winter.