Borlaug and the Green Revolution

Made the mistake of looking at Facebook just now before turning to blog. So easy to get drawn into other peoples' mindstreams.

But what is going on?  I know very well where I am right now. I have to take Graham to martial arts in 20 minutes, and after that my day heats up. It is quiet here at my desk, except for somebody with a leafblower across the ridge over there. But I have written about that before.

What is new is this:  I just finished reading Our Daily Bread, a biography of Norman Borlaug.  And who is that, you may ask. I also didn't know until last year, but he was the guy who drove the Green Revolution, the introduction of new hybrid wheat varieties as well as best practices in the application of fertilizer, and also new ways of getting these best practices disseminated across the farming population, a conservative lot by and large. The Green Revolution pulled a lot of the developing world (first Mexico, then Pakistan and India, then other places) out of a condition of dire poverty and widespread hunger. In later years some of the farming practices it popularized have gotten more complicated (think of fertilizer run-off into the Gulf of Mexico and the dead zones caused by hypoxia), but that's life.

The interesting thing is that I had never heard of him till last year, when I heard of him at an AgBio conference. A woman I met with yesterday, a former derivatives salesperson for JP Morgan and Morehead Scholar, also hadn't. But Graham had heard of him through online discussions of the most important people who weren't widely known, and Natalie was broadly familiar with the Green Revolution from AP Earth Sciences.

In other words, our kids are so frickin well-educated it's not funny.

In any case, back to the discussion of this book. It's a fun book, well-written by a guy who is obviously a big fan of Borlaug's (and rightly so), and it tells the story of his growing up hungry in Depression-era Iowa, being the first in his family to leave the farm to go to high school, and he ends up schooling heads of state, including Indira Gandhi, on how to manage their economies. At one point in time he tells the PM of Pakistan to print money so he can support wheat prices so that farmers will bring wheat to market instead of warehousing it for lack of good pricing, while others were starving. Quite a path.

Gotta hop!