The Apostles Luke and Matthew both related the same basic story. When Jesus was asked how one should pray, he provided an example. The model prayer started with an acknowledgement of God’s power. Then there are a series of asks of God. Most are two sided. Forgiveness (from either debt or sin) is asked for – along with the ability to forgive others. Protection from temptation is asked for – along with the ability to resist evil temptations. One request of God is different:
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
This request came first. Further, it did not have the two-sided construction of the other requests. Jesus asked that people get bread – daily – but unlike with the other requests he did not ask for the ability to meet a return obligation. Jesus asked that people get bread but does not ask for the capacity/duty to create it.
At one level, this simply seems to stress the importance of bread. If you read “bread” broadly as food, it points to the absolute physical necessity of food for physical survival. Its supply is essential on a regular basis. You can miss a day without food, but if you miss a month your survival is at risk. Two months and you are a goner.
But I find the construction of the prayer a little odd. If we read “bread” narrowly as “bread”, then we mean wheat. This was one of the earliest and most important domesticated crops – that is, plants created by a partnership between nature and humans. Charles Darwin believed that his theory of evolution revealed the mechanism of God’s plan. Differentiation and selection created and recreated organisms best suited for their environmental niche. With domestication, humans assume the role of God’s helpers by actively giving direction to the evolutionary process. God gives us the basic plant. We transform it into the means to produce our daily bread.
If you are still reading, bear with me. This will get to something that is better than it was in the good old days. I promise.
We are going to look at how humans made a genus of grass called Triticum into something better. Something we call wheat. People created and grew wheat to give themselves their daily bread (and pasta and other good foods). After about 10 or 12 thousand years people created the good old days by using carbon powered machinery to grow wheat and create the good old days. Then we’ll look at how people made wheat better than it was in the good old days.
Wheat before the Good Old Days
Wheat began as a genus of grass called Triticum that was indigenous to what is now part of Turkey. At some point in prehistory – perhaps as distant as 25,000 years ago, perhaps as recently as about 10,000 years ago – someone discovered that Triticum seeds could be cooked and eaten. If they were crushed first, something we now call flour or meal could be produced. This made better food. People began to assist evolution by searching for and selecting the plants that had the plumpest seeds in heads that would remain attached to the plant while it was being cut down. Rupture with the past occurred when this selection process produced a plant that could not reproduce itself without the human intervention to separate the seeds from the husks. With this, Triticum was domesticated into wheat.
Human intervention in the differentiation and selection of wheats produced a few basic distinctions. The genus Triticum separated into Triticum aestivum, which became known as bread wheat. Dough made from its flour was elastic, which made leavening possible. The other major wheat produced by human intervention was Triticum durum. This can grow in dryer climates than Triticum aestivum. Its seeds are larger, heavier, and harder but its dough is less elastic. It is better for pasta than for bread.
About a dozen other types of wheat were produced 10,000 years ago, but none are particularly important for feeding the world or for our story.
The other major distinction that was created were the growth-habit. Winter wheat is planted in the late summer. It germinates and establishes a root system before winter. Then it lays dormant. When spring comes, the plants can take advantage of spring moisture to grow quickly and produce an early harvest before bad weather and frost in the fall.
The challenge for winter wheat is cold winters. If it gets too cold or if it is cold without snow cover, the roots get killed. This means no crop, which means no daily bread.
The answer to the problem of cold winters is spring wheat. It is planted after winter is over. Spring wheat germinates, grows, matures, and is ready for harvest while avoiding winter.
The challenge for spring wheat is early winter. Because it germinates later, spring wheat matures later. A fall frost can kill the plant before it is ready to harvest.
Human intervention into the process of differentiation and selection has created specialization in wheats. The severity of winters and the number of frost-free days determine whether farmers will plant winter wheat or spring wheat. Seeds from spring wheat cannot be planted in the fall, and vice versa. The patterns of cold – along with moisture levels and soil conditions – determine where wheat can be grown at all.
After wheat was domesticated, we’d reached the pre-good old days of an agricultural economy. People could do things like toil in fields under the hot sun, live in one place, build cities, fight big wars, and that other fun stuff. It was also possible to store wheat, which meant that eating could become a daily occurrence (most of the time), which was something worthy of thanking God for.
But the basic wheat plant did not change that much for 10,000 years. As wheat growing was extended into new areas, farmers (and starting in the 19th century, scientists) would breed types of wheat suited for particular soil and climactic conditions. As an example, we can look at wheat in Canada.
The first attempts to grow wheat in what is now Canada happened in Nova Scotia in 1605, but wheat cultivation in the cold climate of Canada were not particularly effective until the winter of 1841-42. A Scottish immigrant named Robert Fife wrote home to a friend to ask for some seeds. The friend complied and a spring wheat known as Red Fife took hold.
Red Fife was great for Southern Ontario. As farmers moved into the prairies, they took Red Fife with them. But there was a problem. The growing season was shorter. Crops frequently failed because of frost. By this point, things had begun to change wheat breeding. Governments and scientists had begun to get involved. A civil servant named Charles Saunders at the federal government’s experimental form near Ottawa crossed Red Fife with a variety from India - Hard Red Calcutta – to produce Marquis in the winter of 1903/04. Marquis matured and ripened an average of 7 to 10 days quicker than Red Fife. This made consistently viable in most of the prairies. As much as anything else, Marquis wheat made Saskatchewan into Saskatchewan.
With the fast-maturing Marquis wheat, the cold winters and short summers of the Canadian prairies were overcome. The other major problem hurting wheat production was disease; most importantly, a fungal disease called rust. The federal government sent up the Dominion Rust Research Laboratory in Winnipeg in 1925. Led by a woman named Margaret Newton, this research station created a rust-resistant variety of wheat called Renown in 1936. It joined a variety created in Minnesota a year earlier that went by the name of Thatcher.
With this, the Canadian prairies claimed the title of “Breadbasket of the World.” It wasn’t really – more wheat was grown in places such as the United States, Russia, and China – but we grew a lot.
In addition to varieties of rust-resistant varieties of wheat suited for the inhospitable climate, the other necessary condition to create the good old days was the transformation of tools into machines and the replacement of human/animal muscle power with the internal combustion engine. Let’s look at innovations for ploughing, seeding, reaping, and threshing.
Until the late 1800s, the progress in the tools used for growing wheat was very slow. Let’s look at plows. About 4,000 years ago, people began to replace hoes and digging sticks with wooden plows pulled by animals. About 2,000 years ago, Chinese innovators developed the mould board plow with a heavy iron tip. This allowed for deeper plowing. This technology was imported to Europe by the Dutch – about 1,700 years later. In 1837, an American named John Deere invented a steel plow. Plows were getting better – slowly – but the basic technology remained the same. One animal. One person. One single-bladed plough. It took the invention of the tractor – first powered by steam, then by the internal combustion engine – that plows could be made to turn over multiple furrows at the same time.
The first method of seeding was simple: throw the seeds around and stomp them into the earth. About 4,000 years ago, the seeder plow as invented in Mesopotamia. A funnel holding seed was attached the plough. Seeds would drop into the bottom of the furrow. The person doing the ploughing would step on them as they plowed to set the depth. In 1701, an English lawyer named Jethro Tull invented the first agricultural implement with moving parts – a seed drill. It could place seed uniformly into a furrow. (266 years later, the manager for a British rock band created a weekend name to hide the fact the band had played at the same club a week earlier. The alias stuck, making Jethro Tull probably the only rock band named after a lawyer who invented an agricultural implement.) Tull’s first model could only plant one row of seeds at a time, but over time capacity improved.
Harvesting wheat was always labor intensive. The first wheat farmers are believed to have grabbed handfuls of wheat and cut the stalks with a flint knife. After humanity moved on from the stone age, the sickle was invented. It was a knife with a curved metal blade. This allowed for more wheat stalks to be cut with a single swipe. This method lasted several thousand years. In the early medieval period, someone thought to put a long handle on the sickle blade so people could cut wheat while standing up. A cradle attachment would catch the freshly cut stalks of wheat. This remained the high-tech wheat harvesting technology until 1831, when Cyrus McCormack successfully built the first working prototype of an idea developed by his father – the mechanic reaper. McCormack patented his horse-drawn swather in 1834. McCormack was from Virginia. His invention was initially a commercial failure; the mechanical harvester could not compete with slave labor. In 1847, McCormack relocated to Illinois, sold machines for the flat price of $120 – and provided credit terms and a warranty. Within a decade he was selling over 4,000 mechanical reapers per year.
Winnowing or threshing was the final labor-intensive step. The wheat kernels had to be separated from the stalks and husks. Early methods usually involved beating the heads of wheat and then using wind to separate the wheat from the chaff. In the 1700s, mechanical winnowers were invented. A few centuries later, when steam engines were attached, they became threshing machines.
If I had wanted to make this long story short, I’d simply have said that after a burst of innovation about 10,000 years ago (a “burst” in those days probably measured in the centuries) and then remained basically the same until the late 1700s and first decades of the 1800s. At this point, inventors created mechanical devices. In the early 20th century, steam power replaced muscle power where possible. The internal combustion engine was then replaced steam to create the good old days of growing wheat. The results were astonishing. In 1850, it took about 6 ½ hours of human labor (in North America) to produce a bushel of wheat. In 1940, it took 16 minutes of labor time.
What’s more, application of the experimental process and scientific theory had created wheat varieties that were more resistant to diseases such as rust. New varieties adopted to different climactic and soil conditions extended the extent of wheat growing areas. Places like the Canadian prairies could produce wheat with a reasonable expectation that catastrophic crop failures would not occur too often. By the early 1950s, the good old days of wheat production had arrived.
Making wheat better than in the good old days
We must first define what is meant by better wheat. There are different grades and classifications of wheat. Millers and bakers value different properties. Protein content can vary. As a result, better could be defined qualitatively – but sometimes this is use specific. For example, what producing dough with less elasticity is worse for baking bread, but better for making pasta. Better can be in the tastebuds of the eater.
But there is another, simpler, measure of better wheat. It is a quantitative measure.
More wheat feeds more people. More wheat increases farmer’s incomes. More wheat is better wheat.
I’ve touched on a lot of improvements in what production in the last 10,000 years. Selective breeding changed the evolutionary process of differentiation and selection to produce varieties suited to a wider range of environments. The same process increased the disease resistance of wheats. These developments created more wheat by making it possible to grow wheat in more places and reducing the variability in yield. Mechanical devices and the addition of carbon-based power to these machines dramatically reduced the labor time needed to produce wheat. All of these changes created the good old days.
But one thing did not really change.
Yield.
Some scientists and archeologists believe that wheat yields per unit of land was the same in 1950 as it was 10,000 years earlier. Others are more optimistic about progress. They believe yields – in a good or average crop year – increased by about 20 percent over this time. If the optimists are right, wheat yields increased by an average of 0.002 percent per year until about 1950.
This created a problem.
Human populations were increasing. The only way to increase yields in the good old days was to increase the amount of land used for growing wheat. This pushed wheat growing into more marginal land and climate conditions (think Southwestern Saskatchewan). New varieties could offset some of the resulting marginal yields that come from growing on marginal land, but increases in production were additive. As Thomas Malthus observed in 1798, human population increases tend to be exponential. Additive increases cannot keep up with exponential increases. The result was periodic misery and famine to bring population levels back down to meet food supply.
It was in the nature of wheat to put a limit on the yield. Wheat had long stems. Long stems were functional. They allowed wheat to outgrow weeds to ensure the wheat got the sunlight. The long stems created a miniature ecosystem inhospitable to insects.
Ironically, carbon-powered mechanization hurt yields. Before the good old days arrived, animals such as oxen, horses and mules pulled the plows. They also produced the fertilizer. With carbon-powered mechanization, every farmer could expand the area they farmed. But tractors don’t produce much manure. Diesel fumes are not good fertilizers. Mechanization sped the depletion of soil nutrients and reduced yields.
By the dawn of the 20th century, scientists had a pretty good idea about the mix of soil nutrients needed to produce good crops. The problem was producing these nutrients and getting them into the soil. The most challenging was nitrogen. By the 1880s, it was understood that some plants such as legumes could take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil, but the big breakthrough came in 1909. Two Germans – Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch – figured out that atmospheric nitrogen (N₂) could be converted to ammonia (NH₃) by heating combining air with natural gas in conditions of extreme pressure and heat. If the whole thing did not blow up, it produced a product that was great for making both fertilizers and explosives. Given that the process was invented just before World War I, explosives first took priority. Forty million casualties later, the process was turned to making fertilizer.
The results were – well, disappointing. The new nitrogen fertilizer made the wheat plants grow more, but most of the growth was in the stalk. This made the wheat plant taller, but more unstable. The weight of the slightly bigger head would cause the plant to tip over causing “lodging”, which, in turn, caused lower yields and problems with harvesting.
Wheat that was better than in the good old days was created in Mexico. The Mexican government provided land for experimental farms and governmental commitment. The Rockefeller Foundation provided the cash. Some (mostly) American agronomists provided the brains. Farmers in Mexico – and then India, Pakistan, and Turkey provided the enthusiasm. And Japan provided the sword that cut the Gordian knot tying down wheat yields.
Over the millennia, Japanese farmers had used a process of differentiation and selection to create a dwarf wheat. It had a very short stock. The shortness of the stalk created problems in harvesting, so the variety never spread beyond Japan. That is, until the Mexican research project headed by an American agronomist named Norman Borlaug came up with the idea of crossing Japanese dwarf varieties with the rust-resistant, quick-maturing varieties that had been developed in North America.
Voila.
Better wheat.
Application of fertilizers increased the size of the head rather than the length of the stem. What’s more, the shorter stems were sturdier. They could hold up the weight of the heavier heads. The increased yield could not only be grown. It could be harvested.
Of course, it was not that simple. All manner of impacts had to be dealt with. Sowing techniques had to change since the semi-dwarf varieties did not need to be planted as deeply. The semi-dwarf varieties made fertilizers effective, but the right application rates and mixtures had to be discovered. The smaller plants made the improved wheat more susceptible to insects, so a combination of chemicals and cross-breeding with insect resistant varieties were needed. People had to be convinced that the new wheats were better. Borlaug and his associates found farmers were easy to convert to the new wheat varieties. They would ask good farmers in different areas to grow two plots side by side. One was labelled “your way.” The other, “our way.” Nearby farmers would be invited to watch the harvest – and see the two demonstration crops be measured. Generally speaking, farmers – no matter what the country – only had to see this once to be convinced. Government bureaucrats were tougher. In many places, pressure for change came from the bottom up.
The next problem was securing enough seed and fertilizer. But very quickly, the problem turned into one of abundance. Storage facilities and price maintenance became major problems.
In 10,000 years of growing wheat, yields had increased by – at most – 20 percent. After the Mexican research project headed by Borlaug created the green revolution, yields doubled in less than two decades. Today – less land is planted in wheat than in 1950. The world produces three times as much wheat.
Even in the good old days, millions or tens of millions of people would die of famine in a year. Since the Green Revolution, large scale famine has disappeared except where war has disrupted the distribution of food.
Wheat.
It’s better than in the good old days. There’s more of it. That makes it better.
A final observation on priorities
Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. The Nobel Prize website explains it as follows:
The expression “the green revolution” is permanently linked to Norman Borlaug's name. He obtained a PhD in plant protection at the age of 27 and worked in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to make the country self-sufficient in grain. Borlaug recommended improved methods of cultivation, and developed a robust strain of wheat - dwarf wheat - that was adapted to Mexican conditions. By 1956 the country had become self-sufficient in wheat.
Success in Mexico made Borlaug a much sought-after adviser to countries whose food production was not keeping pace with their population growth. In the mid-1960s, he introduced dwarf wheat into India and Pakistan, and production increased enormously. The expression “the green revolution” made Borlaug's name known beyond scientific circles, but he always emphasized that he himself was only part of a team.
The award was a wise one. If you believe that scarcity, want, and hunger create conflict, then action to reduce these bad things will contribute to peace. With this logic, Borlaug’s award is eminently appropriate. I’d go so far as to say it is the most deserved Nobel Peace Prize in the history of the award.
The strange thing is that it is unique.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded 104 times to a total of 111 individuals and 30 organizations. Ten people or organizations have won for their work in getting rid of nuclear weapons. Sixteen have won for their work building the United Nations or the League of Nations as peace-delivering organizations. Five people have won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to the Middle East. Three individuals won for their work in creating the Locarno Treaty – which officially abolished war in the 1920s. What I’m trying to say here is that there is a certain pattern of futility in these awards.
Borlaug’s award was different. Creating world peace was not his goal. Helping feed people was. But well-fed people are often less combative people. Hunger breeds desperation. Desperation breeds violence. Reducing hunger and poverty helps create peace.
Norman Borlaug is the only winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who won because he helped to create “more”.
Another final observation: policy stupidity
Norman Borlaug got the Nobel Peace Prize and good on him. However, in his own writing he makes it very clear that he did not create the green revolution and better wheat. This was a collective effort. When he first went to Mexico, the entire country had only one agronomist studying wheat. The Mexican government set about changing this in a determined and organized way. After the program had success, the Mexicans were incredibly generous in sharing knowledge and seed with other countries.
There were a few happy accidents. For example, the Mexicans set up several research stations in different parts of the country with widely varying climate and moisture conditions. This was not done intentionally but played a huge role in creating the new varieties. After all, the evolutionary process is one of differentiation and selection. Creating a research program in different environments was useful.
But Borlaug gave much of the credit for the Green Revolution to farmers. He worked to have much of the research activity done by farmers. New strains and techniques were tested on real farms. The results were as open and transparent as possible. All farmers in an area surrounding a test plot would be invited to observe and help weigh the crops. They could see and feel the improvements. As a result, they were quick and eager adopters of anything that worked. Once the better wheat strains were introduced, the main problem was getting enough seed, fertilizer, and storage facilities in place quickly enough.
Borlaug contrasted the responsiveness of farmers to empirical results with the sluggishness of (many) government bureaucrats. Many resisted new varieties and new methods – and generally blamed the farmers for slow implementation. Farmers, they said, were intractably resistant to change. Borlaug’s experience was the same as Cyrus McCormack’s a century earlier. If farmers could see something worked better – and they got some benefits from it – they were eager to change.
Let’s look at an example of how bureaucratic resistance to change slowed the development of better wheat in Canada.
Before being introduced to market, new varieties of wheat have to be registered. To register a variety, it must be differentiated from existing varieties. It is a fraud prevention measure. Way back when – before the good old days – unscrupulous seed sellers were claiming their seeds would get yields of over 100 bushels per acre. In 1905, Parliament stepped in to pass The Seed Control Act. All seed varieties had to be registered. In 1923, it became mandatory to field test – in Canada – all new seed varieties before they could be marketed.
So far, so good.
But the question remained. How does one differentiate between different varieties? In 1905, the method was to visually inspect the kernel. It had to be similar enough to others to be placed in a class, but different enough to be seen as new. “What you see is what you get” was the rationale. This was known as Kernel Visual Distinguishability (KVD). This was probably the best that could be done in 1905. But times change. Breeding programs produced wheat varieties that were genetically different with dramatically different yields. But to the naked eye, the kernels looked the same. With KVD, this meant no registration and no sale of the new seed variety. The United States moved on from the KVD system in the early 1960s. In Canada, it lingered on until 2008. I’ve looked at the Hansard record of the Parliamentary Committee debate on this. Wheat researchers and farmers were begging for change. Department of Agriculture officials were insisting the status quo was the best. To his credit, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz sided with both science and farmers against his own officials.
How weird had KVD-based registration become by the 21st century? I’ll use an analogy. My wife and I were watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. We both noted that many of the Oiler players all looked the same. They had these big, reddish-blonde beards. When you looked at them sitting on the bench, they kind of looked the same. On the ice, differentiation became apparent. Using a Player Visual Distinguishability (PVD), the coaches would have treated them all the same for line composition and playing time.
A more serious example of policy stupidity came in the old Soviet Union when a guy named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko became Stalin’s favorite agronomist and scientist.
As I’ve stressed earlier, the evolution process is based on a process of differentiation and selection. But how is differentiation created? Today we are pretty sure it is based on genetics. Sexual reproduction creates unique genetic combinations. Sometimes mutations occur. But a century ago, this was only one of the theories on the table. Another was called Lamarckian inheritance theory. Supporters of this theory argued that characteristics acquired while living would be transmitted to offspring.
Lysenko was a Lamarckian. The theory fit better with the Soviet ideology that a perfect society would create perfect people than did genetic theory. As a result, Stalin promoted Lysenko to be the boss of all plant research in the Soviet Union. When supporters of genetic theory argued against his ideas and policies, Lysenko – being a good Stalinist – had them arrested and often executed. That was that.
How weird was Lamarckian theory? Here’s an example. My paternal grandfather lost an arm in a farming accident long before I was born. According to Lamarckian theory, I should have one arm that is shorter than the other.
Lysenko turned his attention to wheat. Since the Soviet Union had a lot of land in which it was too cold to grow wheat, he wanted wheat that could grow in the cold. He developed an approach he called vernalization. Sprouted seeds from winter wheat were exposed to cold. Many of these sprouts died. Some survived. Lysenko believed the seeds from these plants had been trained to withstand cold and could be used as seeds for spring wheat in places with a short frost-free period. This being the centrally planned Soviet Union, within six years about 8.7 million acres of land was planted with vernalized seeds. Managers of collective farms were sent questionnaires so results could be evaluated. They all lied. Huge crops were reported. It was pretty simple. All this was happening during the Great Terror. If a manager reported the truth, he would be accused of being a saboteur. Arrest and exile to an even colder place would be the best outcome. So, they lied, and Lysenko was given the Stalin Prize, declared to be a Hero of Socialist Labor, and made a member of the Order of Lenin.
Vernalization was not Lysenko’s only weird idea with disastrous consequences. Based on Soviet ideology of class unity, Lysenko argued that wheat plants would be cooperative with each other rather than compete for moisture, nutrients, and sunlight. Planting seeds closer together would increase yields. At least that was the theory. Lysenko ordered that seed to land ratios be increased by 400 percent. Collective farm managers dutifully reported a 400 percent increase in yields.
But, in the end, hungry people can’t eat lies. If they swallow them, there is not a lot of nutritional value.
In Matthew 4:3, Jesus said, “man cannot live on bread alone.” People well and truly cannot live on a diet of lies.
In any event, Lysenko survived Stalin’s death and prospered under Khruschev. In 1958, Mao Zedong visited Moscow and was impressed by reports of Lysenko’s success. He ordered Chinese farmers to adopt Lysenko’s methods. Between 1959 and 1962, about 40 million Chinese starved to death. In many villages, possession of a wok became a capital offence. Having a cooking utensil implied you had some food stashed away.
Khruschev’s fall from power resulted in Lysenko’s fall as well. But he had a good run – three and a half decades of making wheat worse. It’s estimated that his methods resulted in over 50 million people starving to death in the Soviet Union and China.
Better is not inevitable.
This is a long and good one on a topic that’s absolutely amazing to me. I was telling Kaelyn the other day about some of the wonders of domestication of plants like corn, bananas, etc.