The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  With little equipment, Borlaug and his Mexican co-workers had to borrow a cultivator and do the plowing by hand. Tying straps around their waists, the three men took turns pulling the plow, one man walking behind to steer. Borlaug’s two main assistants were Pepe Rodríguez and José Guevara, both trained as agronomists at Chapingo. In that time their advanced degree was a point of pride, something that set them above the peasant farmer. They came to work in suits and ties and neatly shined shoes. They resisted getting their hands dirty. Borlaug took a grim amusement in sharing the plow duties with them, watching them struggling in their dark suits through Mexico City’s intense sun, the plow sending up dust in the wind. Eventually Rodríguez and Guevara, like Borlaug, put on work clothes. Khaki pants, lace-up boots, and sweat-stained baseball caps became the project uniform. The three men set to work in April 1945. They hacked out two short rows for each of the 8,600 varieties—more than five miles of rows, 110,000 plants, all put in by hand. In addition, they planted a second, smaller field with another ninety-nine wheat samples sent by Stakman and Edgar McFadden, a U.S. Department of Agriculture plant breeder in Texas whom Borlaug had never met.

  Hardly had Borlaug finished sticking the wheat in the ground when Wellhausen asked him to help build a breeding nursery for maize in the Bajío. The two men arrived in May, working on a hillside outside the city of Celaya, in Guanajuato state. The rainy season had just finished and the hills were prostrate beneath an unseasonable heat wave. At the same time the Celaya city power plant broke down. Unable to eat in hot, dark restaurants with no fans, Borlaug and Wellhausen cooked meals over fires fed by maize cobs. The same fire boiled their water. Despite the precautions, Borlaug recalled, he got sick. He would spend the day planting maize in the heat-dazed hills, then stagger to his hotel “writhing with pain and faint with nausea.”

  Much worse was the poverty. Borlaug had been poor all his life but always well fed and decently clad. In the Bajío he first encountered destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational. If Borlaug offered to procure steel plows and hoes, they told him that metal siphoned “heat” from the soil. If he asked about fertilizer, they told him it was a government plot against the farmer. Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair.

  For most of his life, Borlaug had had little focus beyond getting off the farm. Now, in the Bajío, something larger was stirring in his heart. He wrote to Margaret:

  These places I’ve seen have clubbed my mind—they are so poor and depressing. The earth is so lacking in life force; the plants just cling to existence. They don’t really grow; they just fight to stay alive. The levels of nourishment in the soil are so low that wheat plants produce only a few grains….Can you imagine a poor Mexican struggling to feed his family? I don’t know what we can do to help but we’ve got to do something.

  We’ve got to do something. Much like Vogt, Borlaug was acquiring a sense of mission—a shiver in the spine that would drive him for the rest of his life. Vogt’s nascent concerns, first awakened on Long Island, had been crystallized in the Mexican countryside in 1943 and 1944. The same landscape at about the same time sharpened and focused Borlaug’s view. His concerns, initially provoked by food riots in the Depression, coalesced in the Bajío.

  But the two men drew different conclusions from the same picture; they disagreed about which elements were figure and which were ground. Vogt saw the land behind and beneath as the protagonist of the story—the origin of both problem and solution. With his ecologist’s eye, he viewed the fundamental issue as one of carrying capacity. People, biological agents like any other, had to fit in.

  By contrast, Borlaug saw the farmers as the central characters. Their suffering was caused not by overshooting the capacity of the land but by their lack of tools and knowledge. With industrial fertilizer, advanced irrigation techniques, and the finest new seed stock, they could transform the landscape, making it more productive and themselves wealthy. Fitting in with their world would be a human catastrophe. Instead they needed to reconstruct that world on more useful principles.

  To Borlaug, the people he saw struggling in the Bajío were like the farmers who had rioted in Minnesota, driven by need and helplessness almost to madness. The solution was straightforward: bigger harvests. More food would mean more money would mean less hunger and poverty. Neither Vogt nor Borlaug gave any thought to how the consequences of their ideas would ripple across the world.

  Shuttle Breeding

  Borlaug spent every day in the late spring and summer of 1945 with his thousands of wheat varieties, knee-walking through the rows of young plants in a search for the powdery blisters that signaled stem rust. If he saw them on leaves or stem, he yanked out the plant and discarded it. When he finished inspecting all 110,000 plants, he began anew.

  The work seemed endless, even though he now had two more assistants in Chapingo (the new assistants, at Harrar’s insistence, were women, a break with tradition). If each person spent ten seconds examining each plant, the five sets of eyes and hands would take two weeks to finish a single round of inspection. That wasn’t fast enough to catch stem rust; they worked longer hours.

  To avoid the hour-and-a-half commute from his apartment to Chapingo, Borlaug laid a sleeping bag on the dirt floor of the research shack. After a while he stopped being bothered by the rodeodores—“tiny flies that imbibed so much of our blood they could no longer fly; we’d watch them roll off our arms and flop to the ground.” He stopped being bothered by the heat and dust and the taste of water boiled in beef-stew cans. He stopped being bothered by only being able to change his clothes and shower once a week, when he returned to Margaret and Jeanie. Sometimes Pepe Rodríguez and José Guevara stayed with him (the women were not permitted to sleep in the fields). They rose before sunrise, when the air was cool, and crouched down in the faint light, looking for stem rust. Always they found it. The number of plants shrank as summer progressed.

  Shrank almost to zero, in fact. Puccinia graminis destroyed each and every one of the eight thousand varieties from the Bajío, as well as the six hundred sent by the governments of Mexico and the United States. The second, smaller field—planted with ninety-nine wheat samples from Stakman and the Texas breeder—fared slightly better. Four types did not succumb to rust, two from each man. The four spindly rows were all that remained of the 110,000 plants put in the fields by Borlaug and his assistants. Once again, the Rockefeller experts had failed.

  In the months he spent yanking out rust-afflicted plants, Borlaug had had a long time to think. No record survives of his rumination. But by following his actions, reading later interviews, and poring through the papers of his co-workers it is possible, perhaps, to trace the outline of his thoughts.

  What he was thinking (I believe) was that Harrar had it wrong. So did Stakman, the entire Rockefeller hierarchy, and Sauer, too. What he was thinking was that the Rockefeller project wasn’t going to succeed. It would have too little impact and take too much time.

  The Rockefeller Foundation had been charged with boosting harvests in Mexico by working with farmers in the Bajío. But these were some of the nation’s most deprived people on some of its most degraded land. Increasing their productivity would benefit them—a great thing. But the land was so marginal that even tripling its output would do next to nothing for the nation as a whole. (Three times a small number is another small number.) On top of that, the nation’s poor infrastructure ensured that any extra grain from the Bajío could not be sent from the highlands to other places. It would be like trying to solve the problems of the United States as a whole by assisting the farmers of Saude, with their bad soil and lack of
access to railroads. Bajío farms could boom and Mexico would still need to import maize and wheat.

  The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to “feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace.” Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

  Alas, that goal seemed next to impossible. With its mountains, deserts, and wet valleys, Mexico was ecologically diverse. To breed wheat suited to each climatic and soil zone, Borlaug would have to set up programs in many different places. The project didn’t have the staff or funds to do that. But even if it did, Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn’t be hurried; farmers could grow only one crop of winter or spring wheat a year. But the Rockefeller Foundation wasn’t going to wait fifteen years. And the farmers needed help now.

  In the fields, Borlaug came up with a solution. As he told Harrar, he wanted to combine two breeding methods. One was difficult but conventional; the other was equally difficult, but not conventional at all. The first, conventional method was high-volume crossbreeding—breeding together many different varieties in the hope of producing favorable new variants. Genetically speaking, high-volume crossbreeding is equivalent to throwing a huge number of darts, in the belief that chance will eventually produce a bull’s-eye. High-volume crossbreeding was typically the province of big laboratories with large staffs. Borlaug and his small team would have to sow and raise thousands upon thousands of wheat plants, collect each plant’s pollen individually, hand-pollinate the blossoms, harvest the resultant grain plant by plant, and then grow that grain to discover the results of their crossbreeding.

  Harrar thought that this procedure was possible, though he worried about whether Borlaug’s team had sufficient resources and personnel. But he vehemently opposed Borlaug’s second, unconventional method: shuttle breeding, as it has come to be called.

  Shuttle breeding was intended to speed up crossbreeding by taking advantage of Mexico’s diverse terrain, which stretches two thousand miles from the country’s semitropical south to its semiarid north. This vast area held three main wheat-growing regions: the Bajío, in central Mexico, where the Rockefeller Foundation was working; the Pacific Coastal Plain in the state of Sonora, along the Gulf of California; and a smaller area called La Laguna, north of the Bajío. Borlaug’s idea was to split the breeding program between two of these zones: the Bajío (and nearby Chapingo) and Sonora, seven hundred miles to the northwest.

  In November, after the harvest, Borlaug would take his four surviving varieties to Sonora, where he would breed them with each other and many other cultivars in an effort to produce new cultivars that both resisted stem rust (as the four survivors did) and produced a lot of grain (as the other strains would if they didn’t succumb to rust). In April he would harvest the seed from the best plants and take it to the Bajío, where he would perform a second round of crossbreeding. Because summer in the Bajío was wet, the area was like an incubator for plant diseases. Borlaug could use the second generation as a screen to check susceptibility to diseases other than P. graminis: viruses, bacteria, different types of fungi. In October he would harvest the most resistant seed from the second round—and take it to Sonora for a third round, where he could scan for plants that produced the most grain. The fourth generation, in the Bajío, would be examined to ensure that these high-producing plants still maintained their resistance to multiple diseases. By the sixth generation, Borlaug believed, he could have varieties ready for farmers to field-test. By ricocheting back and forth between Sonora and the Bajío, new, rust-resistant varieties could be ready for wide use in five years, half the usual time. (Left unnoted in this description: Margaret would be left to raise their daughter by herself for half the year.)

  Borlaug had not chosen Sonora at random. Blessed with plenty of sun and good soil, coastal Sonora was the site of several big new irrigation projects. Borlaug had wangled a ticket that summer to Ciudad Obregón, Sonora’s second-biggest city, thirty miles from the Gulf of California. Between the city and the gulf were about 145,000 acres of irrigated rice and wheat. The land was in the delta of the Yaqui River, enriched over the centuries by flooding. Like the Bajío, the region was afflicted with stem rust. But if its farmers could get rust-resistant wheat, Borlaug thought, they could produce more wheat than would ever be possible in the Bajío. Sonora could become a breadbasket for all of Mexico.

  Harrar wouldn’t hear of it. The Mexican government had been clear about restricting Rockefeller to the Bajío. But even if the foundation had been permitted to work in Sonora, Borlaug’s scheme violated a cardinal rule of plant breeding: breeders had to develop new varieties in the environment in which they would be grown, so that they would be well adapted for that region. Winter wheat thus could not be bred in a place where farmers grew spring wheat, and vice versa. It was worse to try this in Sonora and the Bajío, where the climates were so different.

  Mexico’s wheat-growing areas, as shown in a map from the Mexican Agricultural Program in the early 1950s Credit 29

  Borlaug stubbornly insisted. The irrigation projects in the Yaqui Valley were opening up farmland so good that it would be folly for him to ignore it. And he promised to do the work entirely on his own; the foundation wouldn’t have to pay anything extra. As for his idea’s workability—to Borlaug, the virtue of being able to move faster would be worth whatever problems came from not developing these new wheat varieties in the place where they were to be grown.

  Prizing loyalty, Harrar expected his subordinates to follow him, and in return he would back them completely. Borlaug’s intransigence infuriated him, but his position was weak. Rockefeller’s maize program was faltering. Firing Borlaug would put the wheat program in jeopardy, too. In the end, Harrar grudgingly agreed to let Borlaug try Sonora for a season, but only if he spent no program funds and concealed his work from the authorities. Still, a coldness grew between the two men; their relationship never recovered.

  Late that year a ramshackle, six-passenger plane took Borlaug to Ciudad Obregón, at the edge of the Yaqui Valley. Twelve miles outside the city was an abandoned agricultural experimental station that Borlaug planned to use as his base. Because he had no car, he hitchhiked from the airport to the experimental station. In his luggage were his clothing, many cans of beans and stew, and the total product of the previous year’s labor: a couple thousand seeds from the four resistant varieties and samples of new strains that he had picked up nearly at random—seeds that he had taken from an abandoned field in his first visit to Sonora, for example.

  The experimental station, built in 1938 to work with cattle and pigs, was a shambles: “Windows broken, roofs beat to hell, the machinery all broken up, and the livestock and whatnot had been sold off or had died or both. Just a complete disaster.” Borlaug set up his bed—a piece of canvas stretched from poles—in a loft above a dilapidated storage shed. There was no electricity, telephone, or running water; insects, rodents, and rain came in freely through the broken windows. The station had no staff except a part-time caretaker. Borlaug built a fire from maize cobs, heated a can of beans, and went to sleep.

  In the morning he inspected the station. The 250 acres of former experimental fields and pastures were overgrown with weeds and shrubs. He would need equipment to clear and plow the land. Walking from farm to farm along the road, he knocked on doors and asked in his bad Spanish if he could borrow a tractor for a couple of days. The neighboring farmers, puzzled and suspicious, did not want to lend their valuable machinery to a random norteamericano who claimed to be a researcher but dressed like a laborer. Borlaug came back to the station that afternoon angry, sunburned, and empty-handed.

  The next day he prowled through the ruined buildings, looking for equipment.
He found broken spades, rusted rakes—and an ancient wooden cultivator, the kind meant to be pulled by a mule. When the caretaker came to work, Borlaug brought him to the field, communicating mostly by gesture. Borlaug strapped the harness to his body and pointed to the plow. Then he began dragging the cultivator through the earth, the old caretaker unsteadily guiding the blade. In Chapingo, Borlaug had been able to swap positions with the other members of his crew. Now it was entirely on him; the caretaker was too old to pull the plow. People passing by stopped to watch the two men as they worked. Borlaug ignored them, leaning into the straps. By noon he was exhausted. He put away the plow, raked weeds from the soil he had turned, and planted wheat until sunset. At night he built a fire, opened a can of beans, and staggered to his cot.

  On the third day of hand-plowing he was approached by the owner of the farm next door. Borlaug stopped dragging the cultivator, wondering why the man was in his Sunday best. Then he realized it was Sunday—his visitor was returning from church. Why are you doing this? the man asked. Why are you working like a mule on the Lord’s day? Borlaug tried to explain. The neighboring farmer listened uncomprehendingly to this pathetic foreigner with his filthy clothing and dreadful Spanish. Finally he told Borlaug that he could borrow a tractor on weekends.

  Having the tractor made a difference, even if it was only part-time. So did meeting a local U.S. expatriate who offered him rides into town to buy groceries. By Christmas Borlaug had planted five acres—about 140,000 plants, he later estimated. He flew to Mexico City and his family. The first thing he heard was that his son had died in the Baltimore hospital. Shoving his grief to the back of his mind, he spent as much time with Margaret and Jeanie as possible. He also tried to make amends with the project office. Harrar had hired more staff, including a forester, Joe Rupert, a Stakman student whom Borlaug had known slightly at Minnesota. He became a friend and soon moved into a spare room in the Borlaugs’ apartment, helping Margaret when her husband returned to Sonora.