The Norman Conquest

a real hero (not some silly war in England)

Today our topic will be a man who is credited with saving one billion lives. He may be the most famous person many people have never heard of.

A statue on the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota. The most important of alumni but not the most famous since he was not a star athlete (he did wrestle for the University). He is credited amongst his lifetime achievements to introducing baseball to Mexico.

The Inspiration

Ah, the grocery store. As my steady readers know, I eat a largely plant-based diet. When people ask me whether I am a vegan, I advise, “No, I wear a belt”. Others might ask “Where do you shop and do you buy organic”? For me, words like vegan and organic have become associated with plant-based eating and they are not related. One way to portray our history is (1) humankind overcame their restlessness as hunter-gatherers and became farmers (2) domesticated grains fed us for almost 12000 years (3) plant science extended our lives on this planet starting in the 1950s and allowed us to live on. Today we will talk about (3).

The Setup

Each time I visit the grocery store, I spend most of my time and cart space in the produce area of the store. Eating healthy is more expensive than eating “everyday” food. I am not an absolutist. I eat all sorts of things but my behavior shades toward a different style of eating. In a previous post, I know that scale has arrived in the growing and raising of almost everything. The use of certain components in the food we eat helps keep the price of food low. A while back I wrote a post titled “Our Finest Hour”. That post was about the eradication of smallpox. In the course of the story, I also wrote about the significance of “The Green Revolution”. When I was in elementary school, there was a lot of attention on world starvation. The nuns would give us these boxes that sort of looked like Chinese takeout containers. Famine and malnourishment somewhere in the world always seemed to happen. We were supposed to fill them with collected pennies to help the underprivileged around the world.

During that period, science “came to the rescue”. One of the people credited with exporting modern farming techniques to the world was Norman Borlaug. I think Borlaug may be the most important person most people don’t know. He is considered the most famous alumni of the University of Minnesota and wears the mantel of “the man who saved one billion lives”.

If you compress the 4.5 billion years of earthly existence to a calendar year, humans have been around 37 minutes and of all of the natural resources consumed thus far (coal, oil, trees, etc), we’ve managed to use about 1/3 of our total historic consumption in the last 0.2 seconds. WE ARE BUSY! The explosion of the human population and the later consumption of resources is a very recent occurrence.

There are two schools of thought about this. There are those who view that natural resources are “endless” and we can just dig deeper or make more innovations. In my opinion, this is a cursory analysis and is more of a wish than a plan. We all might want to lose some weight, but in the ideal we want it to happen without sweating.

Norman Borlaug was a man with a plan. The times and conditions provide the pressure on humans to focus on the conditions. Borlaug was not alone in seeing the writing on the wall of rapid growth in population while food raising practices had not kept up. A person who loves numbers (me) can imagine a straightforward way to look at this problem. One important number would be what percentage of your population works in agriculture. That number COUPLED with the percentage of your population’s needs that your localized agriculture accomplishes. Some places just might buy their food and import it while their population does a value-added activity. Between these two numbers, I think the predicament can be judged.

Here is a reference from Wikipedia about the percentage of a given country’s population that works in agriculture. The range of low to high is remarkable. Subsistence farming is still the way of the world in so many places. I only spent 1-2 minutes with the table in the reference. I merely sorted the list by [% of total employment in agriculture]. It is clear that countries at the top of the list (low %) define the first world and those at the bottom define the third world. While not shocking, the scale of the challenge across the world is sobering.

Norman Borlaug worked in Mexico first and introduced dwarf wheat which transformed life in all of Central America. So how does making a dwarf plant help the problem of too little food? It turns out that wheat and rice through better farming practices were producing enough edible buds that the stalks were collapsing. By methodically breeding and crossing wheat, Borlaug developed a shorter stalk (dwarf) with a more substantial structure. This development would allow the edible wheat for harvest to greatly increase since it could support more buds without collapsing.

A similar technique was later applied to rice in Southeast Asia and countless lives were saved. In the case of rice, narrow stalks meant the rice would collapse into the paddy and rot. Fast-forward to today and genetic modification shows that the breakthrough he achieved was leveraging a hormone that controls for the height of the plant! Because of my plant-based eating, I have learned a bit about the challenges of eating some things and not others. Wheat contains protein but does not provide everything we need. Similar efforts focused on the primary grain rice revolutionized and saved lives on the Indian subcontinent. Similar efforts migrated to Africa and worldwide starvation was AVERTED. Modern farming practices coupled with specialized plant science transformed our world as the population was exploding. It is amazing to observe that starvation has been displaced in many places with a newfound concern of obesity.

We should never underestimate the ability of humans to rationalize. The changing perspective of what we believe and are unwilling to consider ANY OPTION shifts quickly with each scientific insight. The earth is the center of the solar system until it is not. Copernicus is bad until he is good. The sun stops in the sky for Joshua until we realize the consequences and impacts of gravity and electromagnetism. In the United States, it is humorous to me to observe the massive increase in “gluten awareness”. Each time science arrives and keeps the barbarians at the gate, affluence allows people to pursue more and more unlikely ways to differentiate themselves. While it has become trendy to be “gluten-free” it is doubtful that the number of people who toe this line has a real gluten intolerance. I wonder if any of the grandchildren of Mexicans whose lives were transformed by dwarf wheat are now tweeting about their gluten intolerance? I am sure some people are genuinely suffering from celiac disease but their numbers are outsized in affluent middle-class American culture. Here are the numbers.

• 1% of the American population suffers from celiac disease (about 3 million)

• ~6% of the American population is the upper limit of Americans who may have some level of gluten sensitivity

• 41% of Americans BELIEVE gluten-free foods are beneficial for everyone. Most of the growth in these products are cookies, crackers, snack bars, and chips. Perhaps the underlying PRODUCTS are the issue in the first place.

I enjoy my trip through the store that advises that chicken thighs are gluten-free. What a relief. I consider the rise of such thinking, akin to vaccine hesitancy is the result of affluence and the ability to block out the consequences of such crazy thinking. Eating hybrid and specialized wheat delivers nearly everything we need to survive and thrive. There are nine essential amino acids we need in our diets. Wheat contains eight of the nine, only lacking lysine.

Borlaug helped save the world in a critical period for our planet. He was honored with the 1970 Nobel Peace prize. The world population would approximately quadruple during his lifetime (1914-2009). It was his actions and many others in agronomy that saved the world from a catastrophic collapse. Take a look at the simplified timeline for the population of the planet below. The number in braces is the number of years it took to reach each of the billions in population. These numbers are mostly estimates but become reasonably accurate around the year 1000 and quite accurate since the 1800s

• 300000 BCE — homo sapiens start leaving bones and skulls for us to discover

• 10000 BCE - ~1 million

• 6500 BCE - 10 million {finally we are FARMING!}

• 1500 BCE - 100 million

• 1804 — 1 billion {300,000 years}

• 1927 — 2 billion {123 years}

• 1960 — 3 billion {33 years}

• 1975 — 4 billion {15 years}

• 1987 — 5 billion {12 years}

• 1999 — 6 billion {12 years}

• 2011 — 7 billion {12 years}

• ~2023 — estimated 8 billion {12 years}

• ~2050 — estimated 9.9 billion

Many of are quite sure the human impact on this planet is overstated. The trend of population on the rock might give some of them pause. Our human footprint is of LITTLE CONSEQUENCE until about 200 years ago. It is why, despite it not being intuitive that the impact of humans is sudden and serious.

The next time you are at a party and someone says, who do you think is the greatest person who ever lived? You might just say “It might be Norman Borlaug”. Modern agronomy has provided wheat that yields about 40 bushels per acre at 60 pounds per bushel. That kind of change, proliferated around the world, changed our world in unimaginable ways. I am sure your discussion will pause for at least a moment. Here’s a good song for the evening.