Credit: iStockphoto
IN MARCH 2009, Borlaug convened a second council of war in Mexico. Representatives of 200 organisations descended on Obregón City, and I joined them. Arriving by 25-seater plane from Los Angeles, the vastness of the desert below me was stupefying: it stretched for virtually the entire two-hour flight.
As we neared Obregón, the verdant patchwork quilt below came as a shock. The agricultural largesse is everywhere as you drive along the highway into town: giant grain elevator after giant grain elevator, vast cone-roofed grain silos, Corona breweries, bakeries, on and on. It's astonishing to think that what is today a national breadbasket and a global agricultural Mecca was a godforsaken patch of rust-ravaged farmland only 60 years earlier.
That's when Borlaug first visited the Yaqui Valley – the coastal plain the stretches from the Sierra Madre to the Sea of Cortez. Obregón is the main town. Borlaug was the chief pathologist of a project to help Mexico modernise agriculture and feed its people – a joint venture of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government.
His first mission was to bring stem rust under control. Across the country, the cruel fungus was turning golden wheat fields into wastelands of blackened stalks and shrivelled grains.
His eventual victory relied on a combination of skill, steely determination and the hand of fortune – "Princess Serendip," as he called it. He protected the wheat the only way he could – by crossbreeding it to resistant varieties from around the world.
His instincts as a breeder told him that to protect wheat, he would need to do thousands of crosses to capture resistance genes. Not only was he trying to fortify wheat against stem rust, but also the troublesome leaf rusts which bring down yields by as much as a third. And of course there were plenty of other wheat diseases around such as Septoria and Fusarium.
Like a poker player, Borlaug was aiming for a perfect set, a royal flush of resistance genes. And like a poker player he was subject to the rules of chance. To increase those chances, he carried out a mind boggling 6,000 matings between different wheat varieties each year. That created tens of thousands of hopeful wheat progeny from which a few dozen were selected (see "A royal flush" on p52).
Through the sheer force of numbers and 'a feel' for the traits he was trying to capture, he succeeded in putting together a royal flush of rust-resistance genes. Plants such as Yaqui 50, bred in the Yaqui Valley in 1950, resisted stem rust for over 60 years.
Besides making wheat rust resistant, Borlaug also dwarfed his wheats. Yaqui 50, like all traditional wheats, reached to a man's shoulders. That was fine when the wheat was scrawny. But as fertiliser and water fattened the grain, the plants got top heavy and fell over. The solution was to make a stockier plant.
The Japanese are famed for their horticultural miniatures and wheat is no exception. A dwarf wheat known as Norin 10 provided the genes to dwarf Yaqui 50. The famous semi-dwarf wheats, such as Penjamo and Pitic, were born. They sucked up nutrients and because there was little stalk the ears grew even fatter. Yields doubled and tripled.
Then Borlaug hit upon an idea. He first visited the Yaqui Valley in 1946 out of curiosity. His own research station was near Mexico City, some 2,000 km south of the valley. He visited a model agricultural research station that had been set up in the valley in the 1930s; what he found was a station in shambles and the local wheat farmers defeated by rust.
Borlaug wanted to help them; he was an Iowa farm boy after all. But he also glimpsed a way to help himself. At his research centre in the highlands near Mexico City, they planted wheat in the spring and harvested in summer. But in the baking heat of the Yaqui Valley, they planted in autumn and harvested in spring.
Borlaug realised he could just 'shuttle' seed from one place to the next and get two crops per year. It would cut down the seven or eight years required for his massive breeding program by half.
Traditional wisdom was against him: seeds were thought to need a 'rest' and breeders were supposed to breed plants for one environment only. But Borlaug ploughed ahead with his idea – against major opposition. His boss and other experts in the Rockefeller management vetoed the plan. Borlaug quit. His boss relented.
Borlaug's intuition worked and delivered an unexpected dividend: not only did the 'shuttle' halve the normal breeding time, it produced truly international wheat. Seed that stayed on the shuttle had to be able to grow at two different altitudes, survive two different types of ecology and, remarkably, had to ignore the waxing and waning of the day length: at the Mexico City site, the days lengthened as the wheat matured while at Yaqui Valley the days shortened.
The Yaqui Valley shuttle provided for the future prosperity of Obregón. It also provided wheat that could be grown from Australia to Azerbaijan; that could foment a Green Revolution; and by freeing nations from food aid dependency, lay the foundations for building modern economies. As Borlaug told the meeting in Obregón, "The Yaqui Valley was the birth place of the Green Revolution." It was fitting for this war council to convene here.
Black Harvest Report
Congratulations to Elizabeth Finkel for this report. I just StumbledUpon the article and it is the most interesting article that I have read in years.
Well Done.
George
Scary - and what about the economics of it all?
I would love to hear more about this scary issue, especially about the economic aspects. At first sight it sounds like only the big companies like Monsanto will be able to produce resistant wheats continually. They will probably patent all that - won't they? Isn't it ironic that our stock market driven greed in the north will not be able to protect us from possible starvation, but just helps the rust to grow stronger in the South and spread from there? Isn't it time that all this information becomes open source? Should we really keep on allowing patents on plants, genes etc?
Goetz
Public vs Private sector wheat improvement
Turns out that other than Western Europe and Australia, world wheat improvement (breeding, pathology, seed systems, etc.) is primarily in the hands of the public sector. Catalyzing synergies and focus within and among the enormous array of public sector science and technology capacities in wheat is largely what the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative is about. But Goetz is right to flag the risk of restrictions on use of valuable genetic resources, as IP encumbrances are as likely to emerge from the public sector as they are from the private.
Rick Ward, BGRI/Cornell
Excellent article
Great job Elizabeth Finkel, this was a great read. Until today I did not know Norman Borlaug played such a key role in solving the rust problems several decades ago. We can only hope someone is willing to put in the effort to carry on his work, whether its public or private. With current global grain reserves being so low, farmers holding off on using potash fertilizer because of high prices and less than ideal growing conditions this year for north american crops those reserves are shrinking rapidly on their own. I don't think the world can handle another grain shock due to wheat rust in the next 2 years. A grain crisis could be the next black swan.
sr31
This is a fantastic article which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. In lectures I prepared for my students last year, I concluded Ug99 is probably not a major threat to Australia, in the sense that sr31 and sr24 arn't widely used genes in our common varieties here. Lets hope so anyway.
Karen Barry, UTAS, Lecturer (Plant Pathology)
Park (2007) Stem rust of wheat in Australia. Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, 58: 558-566.