Norman Borlaug, the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere. Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that allowed them to provide much more food per acre of land—what farmers call raising the yield. (Borlaug found that as he made the grains bigger, the wheat couldn’t stand up under their weight, so he made the wheat stalks shorter, which is why his varieties are known as semi-dwarf wheat.) As Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat spread around the world, and as other breeders did
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