Dwarf wheat
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
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Borlog's Seeds and Methods
norman borlog spent years growing thousands of kinds of wheat. He couldn't sequence the wheats dna to figure out which jeans caused which traits. The best he could do was cross varieties that had some traits and hoped that one of the cross breeds would happen to have all the good traits and none of the bad. Borlog produced new kinds of dwarf wheat that resisted rust, yielded well and, crucially, had short stems, so they didn't topple over in the wind. From 19 60 to two thousand their wheat yields trebled. Similar work followed on corn and rice. It was dubbed the green revolution.
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