10
The Grass Eaters
We are in the midst of a mass extinction event in agriculture, at precisely a moment in history when diversity for further adaptation is most needed.
—Cary Fowler, in the preface to The Heirloom Tomato by Amy Goldman
Norman Borlaug grew up on a farm in northeastern Iowa near the town of Cresco. His mother, from rural Norway, worked hard. His father, from rural Norway, worked hard. Norman worked hard. Hard work came naturally to Norman, even if other things did not. He lived through the Depression and lived with its hard lessons. As a teenager, Borlaug decided to attend the University of Minnesota. But upon arrival at the university he failed part of his entrance exam and so spent much of the first year taking remedial classes at the so-called general college. Even then several of his advisers questioned whether he was ready for the four-year college. In the end, he was allowed into normal classes. He also wrestled. He was part of a very successful wrestling team with which he would come to travel around the Midwest. On that team, Borlaug was not the cleverest wrestler. Nor did he have the most natural talent. Nor was he the most athletic or the strongest. He was, however, even on a team with several national champions, the most persistent and the hardest worker. In his wrestling, in his classes, and in his life, he won by being tireless.
After finishing his undergraduate degree and his last year of wrestling, Borlaug went on to earn an MS in 1940 and a PhD in 1942, both in plant pathology. He worked with Elvin Charles Stakman, a man dedicated as no other to fighting (and defeating) wheat rust, and Herbert Kendall Hayes, a leader in breeding new varieties of wheat.1 The work Borlaug did with Stakman and Hayes for his graduate degrees was fine but still somehow unremarkable. Yet it landed him a well-paying job with DuPont, working on new pesticides, antibiotics, fungicides, and preservatives. This was, for him and for his family, a story of success. But then World War II started. Like Vavilov, Borlaug tried to enlist in the armed forces. Like Vavilov, he was denied. His job at DuPont was too important to the war effort. He was to save the world one petrochemical at a time, whether those petrochemicals were to be used to control pests or in the production of new fabrics for the military, such as rayon.
Meanwhile, a crisis was brewing in Mexico. The yield of crops, including the key staples, corn and beans, were not keeping up with population growth. In addition, wheat varieties, first introduced to the region by conquistador Hernán Cortés, were besieged by one of the rusts Stakman studied, a stem rust (Puccinia graminis tritici). Wheat crops were destroyed by stem rust in 1939, then again in 1940, then again in 1941. Moreover, when the outbreaks of rust were bad in Mexico, the rust then spread north to the United States.2 Stakman was called in to find a solution.3 Stakman’s first step was to enlist his former student, George Harrar, to run the project, which would focus on breeding new crop varieties. Next, he contacted Borlaug. In 1942, he asked Borlaug to leave DuPont and move to Mexico. Borlaug, although initially reluctant, ultimately agreed. The Rockefeller Foundation supported the overall project, which came to be called the Mexican Agricultural Program. It was one of many agricultural endeavors in those years made possible by American philanthropy.
Borlaug arrived in Mexico in October of 1944. There he was to work under George Harrar. Borlaug initially worked on corn, but his focus soon shifted to breeding a rust-resistant Mexican wheat. Once again, Borlaug was starting out in remedial class. He had never worked on wheat, nor had he ever left the United States, nor did he speak Spanish. His approach was blunt and forceful.4
Borlaug’s work on wheat was based in the mid-elevation region of El Bajío in Central Mexico. In the traditional method of small-village farming, making a new variety of wheat relies on the chance or near-chance breeding of various varieties of the crop and the subsequent winnowing, one generation per year, of the best varieties for each individual soil or climate. For most of the history of agriculture, crops have been tailored to particular soils, particular climates, particular sets of pests and pathogens. Borlaug’s plan was to take evolution into his own hands.5 He would selectively perform many crosses, one variety at a time, until some offspring had the attributes that were desired. He would then breed those offspring with each other until they were all identical (or nearly so) and all reasonably resistant. The problem was that this took time. One made a cross, waited half a year, saw the result, and then, based on that result, started anew the next year. Borlaug was not going to wait half a year. He needed to figure out a way to speed things up.
He decided to start by going bigger. Rather than doing a handful of crosses—which is what Harrar had been doing before Borlaug arrived—with the wheat varieties already present in Mexico, he examined seeds in collections from all over the world, including every variety of wheat in the USDA vault. Based on those he deemed promising, he started to cross every possible combination of those seeds.6 A by B, B by C, A by C, and so on. Some seeds came from Vavilov’s collection. Others from Syria. Others from Japan. In the first year, Borlaug did more than two thousand different crosses. In the second year, he did even more. His hope was that some of those crosses would yield individual plants that were resistant to rust and grew fast. Borlaug wanted wheat varieties that would survive fungi, be sprayed for pests, and suck up whatever water and nutrition they could be given—crops that could be grown across millions of acres, regardless of where someone might plant them, so long as a farmer could get to them with water, fertilizer, pesticide, and a tractor.
He was asking a lot. Not surprisingly, of his nearly five thousand crosses, just two proved resistant. Neither had all the traits he wanted. He needed more variety. The resistant two, of course, might yield the answer when crossed with other varieties. But the odds were low. And then he had to wait another year to see if any of the next rounds of crosses, between the resistant varieties and more productive varieties, would work. Borlaug was frustrated, but he had an idea.
Borlaug knew there was another region in Mexico where wheat was being farmed, a region nearly a thousand miles north in the Yaqui valley of the Sonoran Desert, far enough away and low enough in elevation for the growing season to extend into fall and winter. The seasons of the Sonoran Desert are delayed relative to those in El Bajío, so in theory Borlaug could get the seeds from a first season of wheat growth in El Bajío (from May to October), plant them in irrigated fields in the Sonoran Desert, and get a second crop the same year (from November to April). This approach would be difficult. The roads to the desert ranged between terrible and nonexistent; he couldn’t drive there directly. He would have to drive into the United States, to Arizona, and then back down to the desert, more than two thousand miles in total.
His plan also went against the basic rules of seed biology, which suggest that winter wheat and many other agricultural seeds need to go dormant for a while before germinating; they need a winter. It also went against the idea that seeds from a place where the day is long won’t germinate in a place where the day is short, and vice versa. It went against decades of understanding. It went against the advice of Harrar—who predicted that the plan would fail and balked at the expense7—and Stakman. Add to this the fact that work conditions in the Sonoran Desert were unusually tough. Borlaug slept in a hayloft. He borrowed tractors and, in one particularly desperate moment, could be found pulling a plow through the soil with his own body in place of an animal. Borlaug was, in effect, a stubborn mule.
But it all worked. Borlaug was able to grow two generations of wheat in a year. He also managed to breed wheat varieties resistant to stem rust. As a bonus, the varieties, having been through the geographic gauntlet, grew if conditions were right regardless of how long the days were (in the lingo of scientists, they were “photoperiod insensitive”). They grew without having to go through a period of dormancy. They were tough and strong, and in the presence of fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, they grew nearly boundlessly.8 By 1950, Borlaug had released eight new wheat varieties to Mexican farmers. By 1956, the seeds of these plants were planted across the country, and Mexico produced four times the harvest it had produced in 1945. Four times. Borlaug hadn’t just created a new variety of wheat, he had also created a whole new approach to agriculture, one in which fast-growing plants, irrigated as much as they needed to be, fertilized and, in many cases, protected by pesticides, became the new model for a crop. The more important a crop, the more likely it would come to be bred using the Borlaug approach, now called shuttle breeding. He was speeding up the world.
Borlaug took his breeding approach global. Rather than just moving seeds between two sites in Mexico, he could shuttle them from country to country, getting half a dozen generations in a single year. This global shuttle breeding yielded varieties of wheat that were even more resistant to rust, including those now eaten around most family tables in the Western world. By some measures, Borlaug achieved as much change in wheat varieties in five years as had occurred in the previous thousands. But whereas the previous thousands of years had tended to generate diversity, Borlaug was producing simplicity, the single perfect form. And why not? There was one perfect way to build a spaceship; one perfect way to build an artificial heart. Surely the same was true of wheat.
Here was real success, but there was a problem. In a way it was the problem of too much success, though it was a little more complex than that. The wheat plants—which, as part of the new agriculture, were fertilized—grew too tall. Their stems could not support their seeds. They fell over, or lodged. Lodging had been seen before, when farmers applied heavy loads of manure or guano, but it was far worse in Borlaug’s high-yielding varieties. The mystery was this: Why wouldn’t the wheat plants, given more food, simply produce more seed? Why did they waste energy on stems when they didn’t need them? Natural selection, after all, favors organisms best able to produce a large number of successful offspring.
To solve the mystery, one needs to remember that wheat plants did not evolve in a peaceful world; they evolved in the grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, where they competed with many other species of grasses and, most intensely, with individuals of their own species. Competition is always most intense within species, human territorial wars being just a particular manifestation of a general phenomenon. Wheat evolved, in other words, in fields in which much of its energy was spent waging war so as to be able to intercept the most sunlight and soil nutrients. In such a war, plants, even mothers and offspring, compete with each other for sun, water, and nutrients.
It is this competition that yields forests. Forests are what happens when trees compete with each other to get closest to the sun. The height of forests is determined by a balance between the availability of water and soil nutrients and the race to grow tall. In places where water and soil nutrients abound, such as in the parts of Northern California where redwoods grow, trees reach a hundred meters (three hundred feet) into the sky, wasting enormous quantities of energy trying to be slightly taller than their neighbors. The same is true of similar climates and soils in Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. We think of the tall trees in ancient forests as majestic; the truth is they are the macho a-holes of the plant world, fighting it out for sun when if they just agreed to share they could save all the energy they wasted on height and build trunks instead. Something very similar happens in wild grasslands, but grasslands tend to have frequent fires, so that the individuals that do best are those that grow tallest most quickly in the time between fires. Where fires are prevented by methods such as modern human management practices, forests quickly take over most grasslands.
Wheat evolved in a fire-prone grassland and so evolved genes that allowed it to grow fast and quickly produce seeds. Each wheat plant is trying to grow taller than other wheat plants, but we want something different from our farms. We want wheat that spends as little energy as possible on stems and as much as possible on seeds, on grains. This has always been a challenge in agriculture, one that has led traditional farmers to breed crops that are typically much shorter than their ancestors and have much larger grains. Wild cacao, for example, is a relatively tall tree, whereas domesticated cacao is something more like a tall shrub. Wild corn—teosinte—has tiny seeds, whereas domesticated corn has, well, corn kernels. But once Borlaug started to favor fast-growing crops, he was choosing crops that, in a given amount of time, grew taller, the opposite of what he wanted in terms of their stems. Worse, once those crops were fertilized and irrigated, they grew even faster, trying even more avidly to block the sun from other plants. Borlaug needed to stop his wheat from competing with itself so that it would produce as much seed as possible and as little stem. He searched the Agricultural Research Service’s National Small Grains Collection, established by the USDA in Fort Collins, Colorado, for shorter wheat varieties but found none that seemed just right.
He didn’t know that years earlier, on the other side of the world, a Japanese scientist, Gonjiro Inazuka (1897–1988), had begun working on just such a variety of wheat. Inazuka sought to develop a short variety of wheat for Japan. He worked at what is now called the Iwate Agricultural Research Center to breed one. The value to Japan of such a variety was the same as it would be to Borlaug in Mexico; it would be a wheat that would produce more seeds, less stem, and hence not fall over. For Japan, an island nation short on land and with a rapidly growing population, achieving more grain per hectare was a necessity. Another option to improve food security for the country was to colonize nearby regions, such as Formosa and Korea (which it did). A high yielding, short wheat variety, if it could be achieved, would not only provide sustenance but also help keep regional peace by feeding more people on the same amount of land.
In 1935, Inazuka bred such a variety, which came to be called Norin 10 (Norin was named for the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry). The moment in which it was produced was a great one.9 Then came World War II, slowing Inazuka’s progress. In 1945, Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15. General Douglas MacArthur entered Tokyo, and the Americans took over the country from 1945 to 1951.
MacArthur was charged with leading the reconstruction of Japan. It was a reconstruction that, in many respects, remodeled Japan on American ideals; this was particularly true for Japan’s agricultural system. MacArthur established a Natural Resources Section in his army of occupation that was charged with solving food shortages after the war through innovation in agriculture, which, superficially, meant the transfer of American agricultural methods and technology to Japan. But the Natural Resources Section also allowed Americans to benefit from Japanese agricultural successes. Here, wheat is exemplary.
The Natural Resources section thought that Japan needed help with wheat. In December of 1945 a man named Cecil Salmon was called in from his desk job at the USDA in Washington, DC, and charged with helping improve Japanese wheat. Salmon, like Borlaug, was a student of the University of Minnesota, where he was also influenced by the vision of E. C. Stakman, and he was happy to get out of the office and back into the field. While in Japan, Salmon helped to set up a national research network for wheat. This required him to travel from field to field around Japan. As he did so, he found as many opportunities to improve US agriculture based on Japanese successes as the reverse. The Japanese had bred many varieties of crops with traits that were missing from the varieties being worked on by American crop breeders. One of these was Inazuka’s short wheat, Norin 10. When Salmon left Japan for the United States in the summer of 1946, he brought Norin 10, which he encountered at a research station in Honshu, and several other wheat varieties with him to Washington, DC. From there the wheat traveled to Orville Vogel at Washington State College; Salmon thought Vogel might be interested in the variety. Vogel recognized the value of the seeds and crossed them with two other wheat varieties. Borlaug requested samples of the seeds and, soon enough, samples of both of those crosses arrived in the mail in Mexico.
For Borlaug, the short Japanese wheat was a kind of miracle. He bred it with his high-yielding wheat, and it produced a high-yielding, rust-resistant short wheat that even when well watered and fertilized did not grow too tall. It also produced more seeds, more grain. With it, yields doubled again. Thanks to Borlaug, Harrar, Stakman, and Vogel (and, unwittingly, Inazuka), in 1965 Mexico increased its wheat yield tenfold relative to what it produced in 1945. These men had changed Mexico. Next they would change the world.
For context, it is useful to compare the yield of wheat in Mexico in 1965 to historic yields. Wheat grown in the wild, like the long wheat gathered in the Fertile Crescent, would have yielded, at most, perhaps a tenth of a ton of wheat per acre. By the tenth millennium BCE, once wheat was domesticated, it would produce a half ton per acre. Over the following twelve thousand years of agriculture—hard years, years in which science helped farming—the yield pushed up to two tons per acre. By 1965, Borlaug and the global wheat-breeding community had pushed this two tons up to six, roughly sixty times the yield of wild wheat. For his part in this work, Borlaug would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
As the years passed, Borlaug became director of the wheat program at CIMMYT and began to work in India, then Pakistan. By that point, Borlaug had become, as the scholar John Perkins has written, a crusader “who took the word about higher yields to anyone who would listen.”10 India and Pakistan did. With this word, with this approach, came many associated changes. Borlaug’s end product was not just a new variety of wheat; it was also a new approach to agriculture. Borlaug, like his adviser Stakman and his colleagues, was globally engaged, focused on results, and friendly to both government and industry. Each seed embodied this perspective; each seed was the result of focused work, done internationally, involving a partnership with—really, a need for—industry. Tractors were needed to deal with farming on a large scale. Gas was needed to fuel the tractors. Pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and other chemicals (themselves nearly all produced from petroleum) were needed, too. Roads and railroads were needed. These things all went with the new agriculture. As did higher prices of land and, in many cases, the concentration of farms in fewer hands. The new agriculture changed farming, which changed how people lived, which changed where people lived. The new agriculture began to shift families away from small towns and into cities. The new agriculture precipitated the largest social change since the origin of agriculture itself. It is hard to overestimate the impact that Borlaug, Harrar, Stakman, and other crop scientists of their generation had on agriculture and, as a result, the average daily life. They shaped where we live, how we live, and even, at the global scale, how many of us have lived.
While Borlaug continued to work on wheat, spreading the gospel of high yields to places such as India and Pakistan, Harrar set about revolutionizing rice, working through the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines. This endeavor, too, was funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in 1959, to the tune of $7 million (roughly $50 million in 2016 dollars).11 Harrar got started by writing to sixty countries to see who might share rice seeds. He was essentially outsourcing Vavilov’s approach, relying on the postal service rather than his own peregrinations. It worked. Many scientists in many regions sent seeds. Harrar was able to build on the model he and Borlaug had used for wheat in Mexico to rapidly breed the seeds they received, but the starting place was modest. Whereas Borlaug was working with hundreds and then thousands of wheat varieties, Harrar started with just a handful of rice seeds—the handful he was sent, enough to do a very modest thirty-eight crosses. Amazingly, out of these thirty-eight crosses he found a variety that was short enough to avoid falling over, resistant to the primary pathogens, and high-yielding.
Each of the crops Borlaug, Harrar, and Stakman worked on, each grass, changed in those years, fundamentally, in terms of how it was grown. These changes and the changes they brought about in the world would come to be called the Green Revolution, where “green” refers only to the amount of food being produced and not to the sustainability of the approach. During the Green Revolution, a few varieties of wheat and rice took over in field after field. Similar changes would follow in other crops.
As they spread, the Green Revolution varieties not only shifted what was farmed, they also shifted what we ate. They shifted it in countries with enough resources to pay for the necessary chemicals and enough political stability to invest in roads and rail lines. In addition, they shifted it in countries that the US government worried might tip into Communism. They were all northern countries or the temperate parts of tropical countries (e.g., India and Mexico). In these places, crops yielded more and so became cheaper. In 1839, the United States produced just shy of four hundred million bushels of grain. In 1958, it produced a thousand times more.12 A thousand times! Meanwhile, the population had increased just tenfold. Diets changed accordingly. As of 2016, wheat accounts for 20 percent of all food calories consumed on earth. It is important not only in those regions where we picture “amber waves of grain”—North America, Russia, and Europe—but also in many poorer regions, places such as Uganda. Think of a plate of food, the average global meal, and divide the part of it derived from plants into fourths. Approximately one of those four parts consists of wheat and one consists of rice, which is to say that nearly half our global diet is composed of just two of the grasses bred by Borlaug and his colleagues—which is to say nothing of corn and sugarcane, both of which are also grasses.
Several things were inevitable as the crops bred by Borlaug, Harrar, and their colleagues spread around the world. One was that the productivity of fields increased. Another was that the size of populations in these regions also swelled, much as they had swelled in earlier generations, when the age of discovery first moved crops around the world and those crops escaped from their enemies. Another was that the pollution associated with soil erosion, fertilizers, and pesticides increased exponentially. Pollution is the waste of human living that is not reused. Every agricultural system has produced pollution. But the new Green Revolution systems produced pollution that acted in far different ways. Fertilizers from fields fed not only crops but also algae in rivers, lakes, and ultimately oceans. Pesticides killed not only the pests that were eating crops but also the insects that ate the pests and, when pesticides were applied too generally, other animals. DDT weakened the eggshells of birds. It also afflicted humans. Herbicides posed similar problems. All this followed like a dust cloud behind the new agriculture of the Green Revolution wherever it went. But there was also something else.
The Green Revolution was economic. It was economic in its consequences (many hundreds of millions of people, at least, benefited). It was economic, too, in that it turned agriculture from a local to a global economic activity. This had happened before—in ancient Rome, for instance—but the new geographic scale of the markets was larger than it had ever been, global or nearly so. And once a farm started to use the crops of the Green Revolution, it was also wed to use fertilizers, and in a way that bound the future to the same model. Once a farm started to use the crops of the Green Revolution, it had to use fertilizers and, in most places, irrigation, pesticides, and herbicides. These compounds created an environment into which Green Revolution crops could be planted. It created what was, in effect, a new biome, one in which the outside world (climate, seasons, and soils) influenced agriculture only in the most extreme cases. Some places are too hot or too cold for a particular crop in this new world. But most of the variations in rainfall and pestilence are removed through chemistry and plumbing. It was a new world in which any crop that could be made to generate high yields by crossing it with another plant (or, later, through engineering) could be produced in great quantities, and the subset that could be made to produce the very most was chosen—by farmers, by the market, by you and me when we go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest box of anything—to continue producing.
The new crops, in short, created a new ecological and economic realm embedded in an American-style agrarian capitalism.13 The economic model associated with the new agriculture was one in which an already wealthy entity could make more money and produce more food, but it was also one in which the farmer was tied to a model that required funds for commercial seeds, commercial equipment, and commercial fertilizers and pesticides. This need would only increase. The farmers who could buy and use the new technologies did better at the expense of those who couldn’t (and who, out of need, often moved into other professions). Most land came to be farmed based on seeds from afar, and this, coupled with the smaller number of farmers, meant that traditional, locally adapted varieties of seeds began to disappear. Inasmuch as seeds were being sold for this new ecological realm, Borlaugia, it meant that there were companies making a great deal of money off of farmers, companies that controlled the key elements of these farms. The seeds that were once swapped from hand to hand were sold for an arm and a leg.
Then there was the question of how long this new Borlaugian world could exist without disruption. As Borlaug was quick to point out, the crops he helped to breed would not do well forever. He gave them thirty years until the pests and pathogens figured out a way to deal with the resistance he had bred into crops or a way to deal with the pesticides being sprayed upon them. If he was right, this meant that well before the thirty years elapsed (roughly in the early 1990s), someone would need to breed a next generation of crops and engineer a next generation of chemicals. But one thing would be different: that person would have to do so by relying even more on seed collections and less on traditional knowledge, which had, by then, started to disappear. That person would have to hope that someone had collected the right seeds and saved them, though that would not prove to be quite enough. Someone would also have needed to save wild nature—the microbes, insects, and trees.