[History of Agriculture] Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution

"The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C. Mann

Rhishi Pethe's "Software is Feeding the World" Newsletter

 "In 1968, the year a USAID official coined the term 'Green Revolution', Norman Borlaug gave a victory lap speech at a wheat meeting in Australia. Twenty years before, he said, Mexican farmers had reaped about 760 pounds of wheat from every acre planted. Now that figure had risen to almost 2,500 pounds per acre, triple the harvest from the same land. The same thing was happening in India. He said the first green revolution wheat had been tested there just in 1964-1965 growing season. It had been so successful that the government had tested it on 7,000 acres the next year, and now it was covering almost 7 million acres. The same thing was happening in Pakistan, and this didn't even count the Green Revolution rice, also short and disease resistant, which was spreading across Asia."

That is an excerpt from the book we'll be talking about here today. "The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C. Mann. The subtitle is "two remarkable scientists and they're dueling visions to shape tomorrow's world."

One of those scientists, "the wizard", was Norman Borlaug: the father of the green revolution. Today's episode focuses on Borlaug's life and contributions to improving crop productivity in some of the most impoverished areas of the world.

This episode is co-hosted by Tim Hammerich and Rhishi Pethe.