Borlaug’s Life

Borlaug’s life was one of odd ironies: He was born in Iowa prairie during the Great Depression and worked on the family farm, attended a one room school, failed the university entrance exam, but was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for his work that ultimately prevented worldwide malnutrition, famine, and the premature death of hundreds of millions (Associated Press, 2009).

Borlaug introduced several revolutionary innovations into plant breeding and agronomics. First, he and his colleagues with difficulty crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce new ones with resistance to rust; this raised yields up to a massive 20 to 40 percent (University of Minnesota, 2006).

Second, he created the so called dwarf wheat variations, which were smaller than the old shoulder high variations that bent in the wind and touched the ground. The new waist high dwarfs stayed erect and held up large loads of grain which results in yields being boosted even further (University of Minnesota, 2006).

Third, he developed a creative technique called “shuttle breeding”. What this technique does is, grow two successive plantings each year instead of the one in different regions of Mexico (Henry Miller, January 2012). 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 noticeably different climatic conditions, the resulting new early maturing, rust resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes, and soil types (Henry Miller, January 2012). This wide adaptability, which was shocking to agricultural belief, proved precious which lead Mexican wheat yields to rise steeply. Similar success stories followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India. However, Borlaug had to fight and convince politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide the farmers both improved seeds and the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation (The Carter Center, 2008).

In Borlaug’s professional life, who died in 2009 at the age of 95 (Associated Press, 2009), struggled against many exceptional impediments of critics and skeptics who predicted that, in spite of his hard work, mass starvation was inevitable and hundreds of millions would expire in Africa and Asia (Alexander Cockburn, 2003). His work stemmed not only in the construction of high yielding varieties of wheat, but also in new agronomic and management practices that converted the ability of many countries he worked in like, Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations (The Carter Center, 2008).

To get a sense of Borlaug’s efforts and accomplishments, from 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain production rose from 692 million tons on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland (Brown, L. R. 1970).