Re: When DID agriculture start?

I hate to admit it but this is exactly the kind of text that Dimmy &
Paul have been doing without for so many years. Thanks for bringing it
together for our attention, Roger.


Roger Bagula wrote:
Domesticated maize was the result of repeated interaction with humans
within the last 10,000 years. Early farmers selected and planted seed
from those plants with beneficial traits, while eliminating seed from
those plants with more undesirable features. As a result, alleles at
those genes controlling favored traits increased in frequency within
the population, while more "deleterious" alleles decreased. Such
selection was made possible due to the tremendous natural variation
present in /Z. mays/ ssp. /parviglumis /(nucleotide diversity at
silent sites has been measured as high as 2 to 3%).


http://www.maizegenetics.net/index.php?page=domestication/domesticationgenetics.html

More serious doubts about the inferences drawn from the AFLP studies
have been raised by Frank Hole of Yale University. Hole agrees with
the timing of einkorn cultivation that the European team gives as
approximately 10,000 years BP, but not with the location. Hole
advocates a more southern location for einkorn domestication because,
he argues, 10,000 years ago southeastern Turkey did not enjoy the
Mediterranean-type climate in which annual grasses like einkorn
typically flourish. This interpretation implies that the distributions
of the einkorn lines may not match those of 10,000 years ago. This
objection challenges the researchers' belief in the geographic
stability of the primary habitat of the wild einkorns. A better
understanding of the historical phytogeography of wild einkorn seems
to be needed. Indeed, the essence of the arguments against the
Karacadag interpretation lies in the manner and degree to which
genetic and geographic trends can be related. These problems cannot be
resolved solely on the basis of genetic findings.


http://www.athenapub.com/einkorn1.htm

People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of
acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them
to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after
11,000 years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then
einkorn and emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon
cultivated grain was their staple food. It happened first in the
Karacadag Mountains in south-eastern Turkey--it is only here that wild
einkorn grass contains the identical genetic fingerprint of modern
domesticated wheat.


http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1

Ears of plenty

Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
The story of man's staple food

Still Pictures

IN 10,000 years, the earth's population has doubled ten times, from less
than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most of the
calories that made that increase possible have come from three plants:
maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until recently
biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first
approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is
that of humanity.

Yet today, wheat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the
acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed
that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999.
Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans,
has largely passed wheat by--to such an extent that it is in danger of
becoming an "orphan crop". The Atkins diet and a fashion for gluten
allergies have made wheat seem less wholesome. And with population
growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the
acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time
since the stone age.

It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so
much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic
monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid--it has six copies of each
gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a
massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six
times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived
from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first
took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian
Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds
incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow
them.

The story actually starts much earlier, around 12,000 years ago. At the
time, after several warm millennia, a melting ice *** in North America
collapsed and a gigantic lake drained into the North Atlantic through
the St Lawrence seaway. The torrent of cool, fresh water altered the
climate so drastically that the ice age, which had been in full retreat,
resumed for a further 11 centuries. The Scandinavian ice *** surged
south. Western Asia became not only cooler, but much drier. The Black
Sea all but dried out.

People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of
acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them to
depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000
years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and
emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain
was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in
south-eastern Turkey--it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains
the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.

Who first replanted the seeds and why? For a start, he was probably a
she: women have primary responsibilities for plant gathering in
hunter-gatherer societies. The time was certainly ripe for agriculture:
the ability to make tools and control fire (cooking makes many plants
more digestible) was already well established. But was it an act of
inspiration or desperation? Did it perhaps happen by accident, as
discarded grains germinated around human settlements?

The wheat plant evolved three new traits to suit its new servants: the
seeds grew larger; the "rachis" which binds the seeds together became
less brittle so whole ears of grass, rather than individual seeds, could
be gathered; and the leaf-like glumes that covered each seed loosened,
thus making the grains "free-threshing". In the past two years, the very
mutations that allowed these changes have been located within the wheat
plant's genome.

Wheat's servants now became its slaves. Agriculture brought drudgery,
subjugation and malnutrition, because unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers
could eke out a living when times were bad. But at least that meant that
they could survive. Population growth was now inevitable. Within a few
generations, wheat farmers were on the march, displacing and
overwhelming hunter-gatherers as they went, and bringing with them their
distinct Indo-European language, of which Sanskrit and Irish are both
descendants. By 5,000 years ago wheat had reached Ireland, Spain,
Ethiopia and India. A millennium later it reached China: paddy rice was
still thousands of years in the future.

Wherever they went, the farmers brought their habits: not just sowing,
reaping and threshing, but baking, fermenting, owning, hoarding. By
9,000 years ago they had domesticated cattle, to which they could feed
wheat to get meat and milk. They could also get precious manure to
fertilise the fields. Not until 6,000 years ago did somebody invent the
first plough to turn the earth, burying weeds and breaking up the seedbed.

Innovations came slowly in wheat farming. The horse collar arrived in
the third century BC, in China. By not pressing on the animal's
windpipe, it enabled the animal to drag greater weight--and faster than
an ox. In 1701 AD the Berkshire farmer Jethro Tull devised a simple seed
drill based on organ pipes, which resulted in eight times as many grains
harvested for every grain sown. Like most agricultural innovators since,
he was vilified. A century later the threshing machine was greeted by riots.

In 1815 a gigantic volcanic eruption at Tambora in Indonesia led to the
famous "year without a summer". New England had frosts in July. France
had bitter cold in August. Wheat prices reached a level that would never
be seen again in real terms, nearly $3 a bushel. Thomas Robert Malthus
was then at the height of his fame and the harvest failure seemed to
bear out his pessimism. In 1798 he had forecast a population crash,
based on the calculation that it was impossible to improve wheat yields
as fast as people made babies (each new baby can make more babies; each
new field of grain leaves less new land to cultivate).

The Malthusian crash was staved off in the 19th century by bringing more
land under the plough--in North America, Argentina and Australia
especially. But wheat yields per acre grew worse if anything as soil
nutrients were depleted. So in 1898, in a speech to the British
Association, a chemist, Sir William Crookes, argued again that worldwide
starvation was inevitable within a generation. Population was rising
fast. There was little new land to plough. Famines became worse each
season, especially in Asia.

This time it was the tractor that averted Malthusian disaster. The first
tractors had few advantages over the best horses, but they did not eat
hay or oats. The replacement of draft animals by machines released about
25% more land for growing food for human consumption.

The Malthusian limit would surely be reached one day, though. The only
way to increase yield was to find a way of supplying extra nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium to the soil. Neither a break crop of legumes,
nor manure was the answer, since both demanded precious acres to
produce. The search for fertiliser took unexpected turns. British
entrepreneurs scoured the old battlefields of Europe searching for
phosphorus-rich bones. In about 1830 a magic ingredient was found:
guano. On the dry seabird islands off the South American and South
African coasts, immense deposits of bird droppings, rich in nitrogen and
phosphorus, had accumulated over centuries. Guano mining became a
profitable business, and a grim one. Off South-West Africa, the
discovery in 1843 of the tiny island of Ichaboe, covered in 25 feet of
penguin and gannet excrement, led to a guano rush followed by a mutiny
and battles. By 1850, Ichaboe, minus 800,000 tonnes of guano, was
deserted again.

Between 1840 and 1880, guano nitrogen made a vast difference to European
agriculture. But soon the best deposits were exhausted. In the dry
uplands of Chile, rich mineral nitrate deposits were then found, and
gradually took the place of guano in the late 19th century. The nitrate
mines fuelled Chile's economy and fertilised Europe's farms.

On July 2nd 1909, with the help of an engineer named Carl Bosch from the
BASF company, Fritz Haber succeeded in combining nitrogen (from the air)
with hydrogen (from coal) to make ammonia. In a few short years, BASF
had scaled up the process to factory size and the sky could be mined for
nitrogen. Today nearly half the nitrogen atoms in the proteins of an
average human being's body came at some time or another through an
ammonia factory. In the short term, though, Haber merely saved the
German war effort as it was on the brink of running out of nitrogen
explosives in 1914, cut off from Chilean nitrates. He went on to make
lethal gas for chemical warfare and genocide.

On farms, Haber nitrogen ran into much the same revulsion as had greeted
the seed drill. For many farmers, the goodness of manure could not be
reduced to a white powder. Fertiliser must in some sense be alive. Haber
nitrogen was not used as fertiliser in large quantities until the middle
of the 20th century, and for a good reason. If you put extra nitrogen on
wheat, the crop grew taller and thicker than usual, fell over in the
wind and rotted. On General Douglas MacArthur's team in Japan at the end
of the second world war a wheat expert named Cecil Salmon collected 16
varieties of wheat including one called "Norin 10", which grew just two
feet tall, instead of the usual four. Salmon sent it back to a scientist
named Orville Vogel in Oregon in 1949. Vogel began crossing Norin 10
with other wheats to make new short-strawed varieties.

In 1952 news of Vogel's wheat filtered down to a remote research station
in Mexico, where a man named Norman Borlaug was breeding
fungus-resistant wheat for a project funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Borlaug took some Norin, and Norin-Brevor hybrid, seeds to
Mexico and began to grow new crosses. Within a few short years he had
produced wheat that yielded three times as much as before. By 1963 95%
of Mexico's wheat was Borlaug's variety, and the country's wheat harvest
was six times what it had been when Borlaug set foot in the country.

In 1961 Borlaug was invited to visit India by M. S. Swaminathan, adviser
to the Indian minister of agriculture. India was on the brink of mass
famine. Huge shipments of food aid from America were all that stood
between its swelling population and a terrible fate. One or two people
were starting to say the unsayable. After an epiphany in a taxi in a
crowded Delhi street, the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote a
best-seller arguing that the world had "too many people". Not only could
America not save India; it should not save India. Mass starvation was
inevitable, and not just for India, but for the world.
No need to starve

Borlaug refused to be so pessimistic. He arrived in India in March 1963
and began testing three new varieties of Mexican wheat. The yields were
four or five times better than Indian varieties. In 1965, after
overcoming much bureaucratic opposition, Swaminathan persuaded his
government to order 18,000 tonnes of Borlaug's seed. Borlaug loaded 35
trucks in Mexico and sent them north to Los Angeles. The convoy was held
up by the Mexican police, stopped at the border by United States
officials and then held up by the National Guard when the Watts riots
prevented them reaching the port. Then, as the shipment eventually
sailed, war broke out between India and Pakistan.
Natural-born mutants

As it happened, the war proved a godsend, because the state grain
monopolies lost their power to block the spread of Borlaug's wheat.
Eager farmers took it up with astonishing results. By 1974, India's
wheat production had tripled and India was self-sufficient in food; it
has never faced a famine since. In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize for firing the first shot in what came to be called
the "green revolution".

Borlaug had used natural mutants; soon his successors were bringing on
mutations artificially. In 1956, a sample of a barley variety called
Maythorpe was irradiated at Britain's Atomic Energy Research
Establishment . The result was a strain with stiffer, shorter straw but
the same early harvest and malting qualities, which would eventually
reach the market as "Golden Promise".
Still Pictures

Today scientists use thermal neutrons, X-rays, or ethyl methane
sulphonate, a harsh carcinogenic chemical--anything that will damage
DNA--to generate mutant cereals. Virtually every variety of wheat and
barley you see growing in the field was produced by this kind of
"mutation breeding". No safety tests are done; nobody protests. The
irony is that genetic modification (GM) was invented in 1983 as a
gentler, safer, more rational and more predictable alternative to
mutation breeding--an organic technology, in fact. Instead of random
mutations, scientists could now add the traits they wanted.

In 2004 200m acres of GM crops were grown worldwide with good effects on
yield (up), pesticide use (down), biodiversity (up) and cost (down).
There has not been a single human health problem. Yet, far from being
welcomed as a greener green revolution, genetic modification soon ran
into fierce opposition from the environmental movement. Around 1998, a
century after Crookes and two centuries after Malthus, green pressure
groups began picking up public disquiet about GM and rushed the issue to
the top of their agendas, where it quickly brought them the attention
and funds they crave.

Wheat, because of its unwieldy hexaploid genome, has largely missed out
on the GM revolution, as maize and rice accelerate into world
leadership. The first GM wheats have only recently been approved for
use, their principal advantage to the farmer being so-called "no till"
cultivation--the planting of seed directly into untilled soil saves fuel
and topsoil.

Soon after Norman Borlaug went to India in 1963, a remarkable thing
began to happen. The world population growth rate, in percentage terms,
had been climbing steadily since the second world war (bar a two-year
drop in 1959-60 caused by Mao Xedong). But in the mid 1960s it stopped
rising. And by 1974 it was falling significantly. The number of people
added each year kept on rising for a while, but even that peaked in
1989, and then began falling steadily. Population was still growing, but
it was adding a smaller and smaller number each year.

Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm, now
forecast that the population will peak below ten billion--ten
gigapeople--not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been
unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the
number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50
years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths
equal births) by 2035.

This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved--and
apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have
fewer babies when they are better fed. The fastest-growing populations
in the world over the next 50 years will be those of Burkina Faso, Mali,
Niger, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen. All except in Yemen are in Africa. All
are hungry. All remain untouched by Borlaug's green Revolution: all
depend on primarily organic agriculture.

In 10,000 years the population has doubled at least ten times. Yet
suddenly the doubling has ceased. It will never double again. The end of
humanity's population boom will happen in the lifetimes of people alive
today. It is the moment when Malthus was wrong for the last time.

Of course feeding ten billion will not be trivial. It will require at
least 35% more calories than the world's farmers grow today, probably
much more if a growing proportion of those ten billion are to have meat
more than once a month. (It takes ten calories of wheat to produce one
calorie of meat.) That will mean either better yields or less
rainforest--which is why fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes are the
best possible protectors of the planet. The story of wheat is not
finished yet.


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<blockquote type="cite">Domesticated maize was the result of repeated
interaction with
humans within the last 10,000 years. Early farmers selected and planted
seed from those plants with beneficial traits, while eliminating seed
from those plants with more undesirable features. As a result, alleles
at those genes controlling favored traits increased in frequency within
the population, while more &#8220;deleterious&#8221; alleles
decreased. Such selection was made possible due to the tremendous
natural variation present in <em>Z. mays</em> ssp. <em>parviglumis
</em>(nucleotide diversity at silent sites has been measured as
high as 2 to 3%).</blockquote>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.maizegenetics.net/index.php?page=domestication/domesticationgenetics.html";>http://www.maizegenetics.net/index.php?page=domestication/domesticationgenetics.html</a><br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">More serious doubts about the inferences drawn
from the AFLP studies have
been raised by Frank Hole of Yale University. Hole agrees with the
timing
of einkorn cultivation that the European team gives as approximately
10,000
years BP, but not with the location. Hole advocates a more southern
location
for einkorn domestication because, he argues, 10,000 years ago
southeastern
Turkey did not enjoy the Mediterranean-type climate in which annual
grasses
like einkorn typically flourish. This interpretation implies that the
distributions of the einkorn lines may not match those of 10,000 years
ago.
This objection challenges the researchers&#8217; belief in the geographic
stability of the primary habitat of the wild einkorns. A better
understanding
of the historical phytogeography of wild einkorn seems to be needed.
Indeed,
the essence of the arguments against the Karacadag interpretation lies
in
the manner and degree to which genetic and geographic trends can be
related.
These problems cannot be resolved solely on the basis of genetic
findings.</blockquote>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.athenapub.com/einkorn1.htm";>http://www.athenapub.com/einkorn1.htm</a><br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">People in what is now Syria had been subsisting
happily on a diet of
acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them
to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000
years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and
emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain
was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in
south-eastern Turkey&#8212;it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains
the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.</blockquote>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1";>http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323362&amp;no_na_tran=1</a><br>
<br>
Ears of plenty<br>
<br>
Dec 20th 2005<br>
From The Economist print edition<br>
The story of man's staple food<br>
<br>
Still Pictures<br>
<br>
IN 10,000 years, the earth's population has doubled ten times, from
less than 10m to more than six billion now and ten billion soon. Most
of the calories that made that increase possible have come from three
plants: maize, rice and wheat. The oldest, most widespread and until
recently biggest of the three crops is wheat (see chart). To a first
approximation wheat is the staple food of mankind, and its history is
that of humanity.<br>
<br>
Yet today, wheat is losing its crown. The tonnage (though not the
acreage) of maize harvested in the world began consistently to exceed
that of wheat for the first time in 1998; rice followed suit in 1999.
Genetic modification, which has transformed maize, rice and soyabeans,
has largely passed wheat by&#8212;to such an extent that it is in danger of
becoming an &#8220;orphan crop&#8221;. The Atkins diet and a fashion for gluten
allergies have made wheat seem less wholesome. And with population
growth rates falling sharply while yields continue to rise, even the
acreage devoted to wheat may now begin to decline for the first time
since the stone age.<br>
<br>
It is time to pay tribute to this strange little grass that has done so
much for the human race. Strange is the word, for wheat is a genetic
monster. A typical wheat variety is hexaploid&#8212;it has six copies of each
gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21 chromosomes contain a
massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as rice, six
times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived
from three wild ancestral species in two separate mergers. The first
took place in the Levant 10,000 years ago, the second near the Caspian
Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a plant with extra-large seeds
incapable of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow
them.<br>
<br>
The story actually starts much earlier, around 12,000 years ago. At the
time, after several warm millennia, a melting ice *** in North
America collapsed and a gigantic lake drained into the North Atlantic
through the St Lawrence seaway. The torrent of cool, fresh water
altered the climate so drastically that the ice age, which had been in
full retreat, resumed for a further 11 centuries. The Scandinavian ice
*** surged south. Western Asia became not only cooler, but much
drier. The Black Sea all but dried out.<br>
<br>
People in what is now Syria had been subsisting happily on a diet of
acorns, gazelles and grass seeds. The centuries of drought drove them
to depend increasingly on wild grass seeds. Abruptly, soon after 11,000
years ago, they began to cultivate rye and chickpeas, then einkorn and
emmer, two ancestors of wheat, and later barley. Soon cultivated grain
was their staple food. It happened first in the Karacadag Mountains in
south-eastern Turkey&#8212;it is only here that wild einkorn grass contains
the identical genetic fingerprint of modern domesticated wheat.<br>
<br>
Who first replanted the seeds and why? For a start, he was probably a
she: women have primary responsibilities for plant gathering in
hunter-gatherer societies. The time was certainly ripe for agriculture:
the ability to make tools and control fire (cooking makes many plants
more digestible) was already well established. But was it an act of
inspiration or desperation? Did it perhaps happen by accident, as
discarded grains germinated around human settlements?<br>
<br>
The wheat plant evolved three new traits to suit its new servants: the
seeds grew larger; the &#8220;rachis&#8221; which binds the seeds together became
less brittle so whole ears of grass, rather than individual seeds,
could be gathered; and the leaf-like glumes that covered each seed
loosened, thus making the grains &#8220;free-threshing&#8221;. In the past two
years, the very mutations that allowed these changes have been located
within the wheat plant's genome.<br>
<br>
Wheat's servants now became its slaves. Agriculture brought drudgery,
subjugation and malnutrition, because unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers
could eke out a living when times were bad. But at least that meant
that they could survive. Population growth was now inevitable. Within a
few generations, wheat farmers were on the march, displacing and
overwhelming hunter-gatherers as they went, and bringing with them
their distinct Indo-European language, of which Sanskrit and Irish are
both descendants. By 5,000 years ago wheat had reached Ireland, Spain,
Ethiopia and India. A millennium later it reached China: paddy rice was
still thousands of years in the future.<br>
<br>
Wherever they went, the farmers brought their habits: not just sowing,
reaping and threshing, but baking, fermenting, owning, hoarding. By
9,000 years ago they had domesticated cattle, to which they could feed
wheat to get meat and milk. They could also get precious manure to
fertilise the fields. Not until 6,000 years ago did somebody invent the
first plough to turn the earth, burying weeds and breaking up the
seedbed.<br>
<br>
Innovations came slowly in wheat farming. The horse collar arrived in
the third century BC, in China. By not pressing on the animal's
windpipe, it enabled the animal to drag greater weight&#8212;and faster than
an ox. In 1701 AD the Berkshire farmer Jethro Tull devised a simple
seed drill based on organ pipes, which resulted in eight times as many
grains harvested for every grain sown. Like most agricultural
innovators since, he was vilified. A century later the threshing
machine was greeted by riots.<br>
<br>
In 1815 a gigantic volcanic eruption at Tambora in Indonesia led to the
famous &#8220;year without a summer&#8221;. New England had frosts in July. France
had bitter cold in August. Wheat prices reached a level that would
never be seen again in real terms, nearly $3 a bushel. Thomas Robert
Malthus was then at the height of his fame and the harvest failure
seemed to bear out his pessimism. In 1798 he had forecast a population
crash, based on the calculation that it was impossible to improve wheat
yields as fast as people made babies (each new baby can make more
babies; each new field of grain leaves less new land to cultivate).<br>
<br>
The Malthusian crash was staved off in the 19th century by bringing
more land under the plough&#8212;in North America, Argentina and Australia
especially. But wheat yields per acre grew worse if anything as soil
nutrients were depleted. So in 1898, in a speech to the British
Association, a chemist, Sir William Crookes, argued again that
worldwide starvation was inevitable within a generation. Population was
rising fast. There was little new land to plough. Famines became worse
each season, especially in Asia.<br>
<br>
This time it was the tractor that averted Malthusian disaster. The
first tractors had few advantages over the best horses, but they did
not eat hay or oats. The replacement of draft animals by machines
released about 25% more land for growing food for human consumption.<br>
<br>
The Malthusian limit would surely be reached one day, though. The only
way to increase yield was to find a way of supplying extra nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium to the soil. Neither a break crop of legumes,
nor manure was the answer, since both demanded precious acres to
produce. The search for fertiliser took unexpected turns. British
entrepreneurs scoured the old battlefields of Europe searching for
phosphorus-rich bones. In about 1830 a magic ingredient was found:
guano. On the dry seabird islands off the South American and South
African coasts, immense deposits of bird droppings, rich in nitrogen
and phosphorus, had accumulated over centuries. Guano mining became a
profitable business, and a grim one. Off South-West Africa, the
discovery in 1843 of the tiny island of Ichaboe, covered in 25 feet of
penguin and gannet excrement, led to a guano rush followed by a mutiny
and battles. By 1850, Ichaboe, minus 800,000 tonnes of guano, was
deserted again.<br>
<br>
Between 1840 and 1880, guano nitrogen made a vast difference to
European agriculture. But soon the best deposits were exhausted. In the
dry uplands of Chile, rich mineral nitrate deposits were then found,
and gradually took the place of guano in the late 19th century. The
nitrate mines fuelled Chile's economy and fertilised Europe's farms.<br>
<br>
On July 2nd 1909, with the help of an engineer named Carl Bosch from
the BASF company, Fritz Haber succeeded in combining nitrogen (from the
air) with hydrogen (from coal) to make ammonia. In a few short years,
BASF had scaled up the process to factory size and the sky could be
mined for nitrogen. Today nearly half the nitrogen atoms in the
proteins of an average human being's body came at some time or another
through an ammonia factory. In the short term, though, Haber merely
saved the German war effort as it was on the brink of running out of
nitrogen explosives in 1914, cut off from Chilean nitrates. He went on
to make lethal gas for chemical warfare and genocide.<br>
<br>
On farms, Haber nitrogen ran into much the same revulsion as had
greeted the seed drill. For many farmers, the goodness of manure could
not be reduced to a white powder. Fertiliser must in some sense be
alive. Haber nitrogen was not used as fertiliser in large quantities
until the middle of the 20th century, and for a good reason. If you put
extra nitrogen on wheat, the crop grew taller and thicker than usual,
fell over in the wind and rotted. On General Douglas MacArthur's team
in Japan at the end of the second world war a wheat expert named Cecil
Salmon collected 16 varieties of wheat including one called &#8220;Norin 10&#8221;,
which grew just two feet tall, instead of the usual four. Salmon sent
it back to a scientist named Orville Vogel in Oregon in 1949. Vogel
began crossing Norin 10 with other wheats to make new short-strawed
varieties.<br>
<br>
In 1952 news of Vogel's wheat filtered down to a remote research
station in Mexico, where a man named Norman Borlaug was breeding
fungus-resistant wheat for a project funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Borlaug took some Norin, and Norin-Brevor hybrid, seeds to
Mexico and began to grow new crosses. Within a few short years he had
produced wheat that yielded three times as much as before. By 1963 95%
of Mexico's wheat was Borlaug's variety, and the country's wheat
harvest was six times what it had been when Borlaug set foot in the
country.<br>
<br>
In 1961 Borlaug was invited to visit India by M. S. Swaminathan,
adviser to the Indian minister of agriculture. India was on the brink
of mass famine. Huge shipments of food aid from America were all that
stood between its swelling population and a terrible fate. One or two
people were starting to say the unsayable. After an epiphany in a taxi
in a crowded Delhi street, the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote a
best-seller arguing that the world had &#8220;too many people&#8221;. Not only
could America not save India; it should not save India. Mass starvation
was inevitable, and not just for India, but for the world.<br>
No need to starve<br>
<br>
Borlaug refused to be so pessimistic. He arrived in India in March 1963
and began testing three new varieties of Mexican wheat. The yields were
four or five times better than Indian varieties. In 1965, after
overcoming much bureaucratic opposition, Swaminathan persuaded his
government to order 18,000 tonnes of Borlaug's seed. Borlaug loaded 35
trucks in Mexico and sent them north to Los Angeles. The convoy was
held up by the Mexican police, stopped at the border by United States
officials and then held up by the National Guard when the Watts riots
prevented them reaching the port. Then, as the shipment eventually
sailed, war broke out between India and Pakistan.<br>
Natural-born mutants<br>
<br>
As it happened, the war proved a godsend, because the state grain
monopolies lost their power to block the spread of Borlaug's wheat.
Eager farmers took it up with astonishing results. By 1974, India's
wheat production had tripled and India was self-sufficient in food; it
has never faced a famine since. In 1970 Norman Borlaug was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize for firing the first shot in what came to be called
the &#8220;green revolution&#8221;.<br>
<br>
Borlaug had used natural mutants; soon his successors were bringing on
mutations artificially. In 1956, a sample of a barley variety called
Maythorpe was irradiated at Britain's Atomic Energy Research
Establishment . The result was a strain with stiffer, shorter straw but
the same early harvest and malting qualities, which would eventually
reach the market as &#8220;Golden Promise&#8221;.<br>
Still Pictures<br>
<br>
Today scientists use thermal neutrons, X-rays, or ethyl methane
sulphonate, a harsh carcinogenic chemical&#8212;anything that will damage
DNA&#8212;to generate mutant cereals. Virtually every variety of wheat and
barley you see growing in the field was produced by this kind of
&#8220;mutation breeding&#8221;. No safety tests are done; nobody protests. The
irony is that genetic modification (GM) was invented in 1983 as a
gentler, safer, more rational and more predictable alternative to
mutation breeding&#8212;an organic technology, in fact. Instead of random
mutations, scientists could now add the traits they wanted.<br>
<br>
In 2004 200m acres of GM crops were grown worldwide with good effects
on yield (up), pesticide use (down), biodiversity (up) and cost (down).
There has not been a single human health problem. Yet, far from being
welcomed as a greener green revolution, genetic modification soon ran
into fierce opposition from the environmental movement. Around 1998, a
century after Crookes and two centuries after Malthus, green pressure
groups began picking up public disquiet about GM and rushed the issue
to the top of their agendas, where it quickly brought them the
attention and funds they crave.<br>
<br>
Wheat, because of its unwieldy hexaploid genome, has largely missed out
on the GM revolution, as maize and rice accelerate into world
leadership. The first GM wheats have only recently been approved for
use, their principal advantage to the farmer being so-called &#8220;no till&#8221;
cultivation&#8212;the planting of seed directly into untilled soil saves fuel
and topsoil.<br>
<br>
Soon after Norman Borlaug went to India in 1963, a remarkable thing
began to happen. The world population growth rate, in percentage terms,
had been climbing steadily since the second world war (bar a two-year
drop in 1959-60 caused by Mao Xedong). But in the mid 1960s it stopped
rising. And by 1974 it was falling significantly. The number of people
added each year kept on rising for a while, but even that peaked in
1989, and then began falling steadily. Population was still growing,
but it was adding a smaller and smaller number each year.<br>
<br>
Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm,
now forecast that the population will peak below ten billion&#8212;ten
gigapeople&#8212;not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been
unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the
number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50
years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths
equal births) by 2035.<br>
<br>
This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved&#8212;and
apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have
fewer babies when they are better fed. The fastest-growing populations
in the world over the next 50 years will be those of Burkina Faso,
Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen. All except in Yemen are in
Africa. All are hungry. All remain untouched by Borlaug's green
Revolution: all depend on primarily organic agriculture.<br>
<br>
In 10,000 years the population has doubled at least ten times. Yet
suddenly the doubling has ceased. It will never double again. The end
of humanity's population boom will happen in the lifetimes of people
alive today. It is the moment when Malthus was wrong for the last time.<br>
<br>
Of course feeding ten billion will not be trivial. It will require at
least 35% more calories than the world's farmers grow today, probably
much more if a growing proportion of those ten billion are to have meat
more than once a month. (It takes ten calories of wheat to produce one
calorie of meat.) That will mean either better yields or less
rainforest&#8212;which is why fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes are the
best possible protectors of the planet. The story of wheat is not
finished yet.<br>
<br>
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