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BOOK EXCERPTS
Foreword
and introduction
A revolutionary wheat breeding program.
The three innovations.
High-volume crossbreeding
Shuttle breeding
Changing the wheat plant’s architecture
The Green Revolution spreads to South Asia
The setting
Norman Borlaug's  "Kick-Off Approach"
SOURCE
The Man
Who Fed the World

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Norman Borlaug
and His Battle
to End World Hunger

An authorized biography
by Leon Hesser

Available Sept 06 from
Durban House Press
ISBN: 1-930754-90-6
250 pages. $24.95
READ MORE
SeedQuest editorial
by Dr. Norman Borlaug
The Power of Seeds
During my lifetime, seed technology has been the catalyst that has averted mass starvation on planet Earth...
SeedQuest presents excerpts from Leon Hesser's
THE MAN WHO FED THE WORLD
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger
Second Innovation: Shuttle Breeding

Borlaug’s second breeding innovation had the initial objective of speeding the process by growing two successive plantings per year—one during summer in the low-soil-fertility, rainfed areas at Chapingo and Toluca, in high altitudes not far from Mexico City, and another during the winter season almost two thousand kilometers to the north, in the irrigated area near sea level in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, where growing conditions and soil fertility were much more favorable.

Ever since his trip to Sonora he had been mulling over an idea he wanted to put to the test. He had brought back some wheat from the farms in the Yaqui Valley, and now, in May of 1946, he wanted to prepare a plot to plant it. If it grew well in the highlands of Chapingo or Toluca during the summer, he would gather the seed in the fall, take it north again, and plant it in the Yaqui. (Because of the difference in altitude and temperature, the Toluca and Yaqui planting seasons were at different times of the year.) The following spring the next generation would be harvested in the Yaqui and would be put into the soil at Toluca, and so on back and forth. It would mean that he could grow two generations a year instead of one, cutting his breeding time by half.

It had not been tried before: two generations each year instead of one, plus a complete switch from one latitude and altitude to another. This concept flew in the face of traditional plant breeding methods, a dogma that precluded two generations per year. But Borlaug saw no genetic reason why he couldn’t grow and select two generations each year. He would try it.

The shuttle-breeding process yielded a double bonus. First, as Norm had predicted, they were able to advance the generations twice as fast. The second result, even more important, was fortuitous. As the segregating populations were shuttled back and forth over ten degrees of latitude and from near sea level at the Yaqui Valley in Sonora to over eight thousand feet of altitude at Toluca, they were exposed to different diseases, different soils, different climates and different day-lengths: shortening from the time of planting in winter in Sonora and lengthening in summer in Toluca. The result was much more than simply a speeding of the breeding process. The plants that survived and performed well at both locations were now well adapted to a wide range of conditions.

Norm said, “The Princess of Serendip had smiled on our unorthodox shuttle-breeding effort.” It soon became apparent that these new early-maturing, rust-resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes and elevations in Mexico. Shuttle breeding subsequently gained credence worldwide as a method that reduced by half the years required to breed a new variety as well as for rapidly achieving wide adaptability to a range of variables.

Borlaug says, “Through the use of this technique, we developed high-yielding, day-length-insensitive varieties with a wide range of ecologic adoption and a broad spectrum of disease resistance—a new combination of uniquely valuable characters in wheat varieties.”

These characters were valuable in increasing wheat production in Mexico and neighboring countries, including parts of the USA, but were to prove even more valuable a decade later when the widely adapted dwarf Mexican varieties were successfully introduced into Pakistan, India, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and China. Without this combination of characters, the successful transplantation of the Mexican varieties into other countries would have been impossible. And the Green Revolution might never have happened.

Page 4 >>

The Man Who Fed the World is copyright © 2006, Leon Hesser.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without the written permission of the Publisher -
Durban House Press

September 2006

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