Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug was born on March twenty-fifth, nineteen fourteen, on a small farm near Cresco in northeast Iowa. His family spoke Norwegian at home. He attended a one-room schoolhouse. He enrolled at the University of Minnesota on a scholarship, intending to become a forester, and instead ended up studying plant pathology. By the time he died in two thousand nine at the age of ninety-five, he is widely credited with saving more than a billion human lives.

That number sounds impossible. It is not. Borlaug spent much of his career in Mexico, beginning in nineteen forty-four, working on wheat. The problem he was solving was stem rust, a fungal disease that devastated wheat crops and periodically triggered famines. Borlaug bred new wheat varieties that were resistant to rust and, crucially, had shorter and stiffer stalks. Traditional wheat bent under the weight of heavy grain and collapsed in the field, a condition called lodging. Short-stalked wheat stayed upright and could carry far more grain without falling over.

He then took those varieties to India and Pakistan in the nineteen sixties, when both countries were facing the prospect of mass starvation. The varieties he introduced, combined with fertilizer and irrigation, produced harvests so dramatically larger than anything either country had experienced that the transformation had a name: the Green Revolution. India, which had been importing grain, reached self-sufficiency in cereal production within about a decade.

Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in nineteen seventy. He used the acceptance speech to warn that the Green Revolution was buying time, not solving the underlying problem. Population growth, he said, would eventually outrun even improved agriculture. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove himself wrong. Iowa gave him his beginning. What he did with it changed the caloric history of the human race.