Page 9 - Breeding Edge ebook

less than seven pounds of feed – to grow the same size bird, all without the use of growth hormones or
steroids, according to the National Chicken Council.

Fryer-sized chickens used by restaurants reach 4-pound slaughter weight at 35 or fewer days of age,
about twice as fast as in the 1960s. Meanwhile, tom turkeys for the holidays are now raised to the typical
14 to 16 pounds in nine to 10 weeks, versus the four months or more required, for example, in the 1980s.

America builds an R&D infrastructure

The road to modern science-infused farming in the United States
wasn’t built in a vacuum. America started laying the foundation for

publicly-funded agricultural research and advancement with the
Morrill Act of 1862, by which Congress granted tracts of land to

states at 30,000 acres per member in Congress. The land was to be
sold to start and maintain colleges “where the leading object shall

be . . . to teach such branches of learning as are related to
agriculture and the mechanic arts . . .” The act resulted in the birth

of the national land grant universities. The Second Morrill Act of
1890 extended similar support to Southern states to open similar

institutions to accommodate black students.

National support for agricultural R&D came with the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided money for the
state land-grant colleges to set up agricultural experiment stations and disseminate information from the
stations. Later, the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established a system of cooperative extension services,
linked to the land-grant colleges, to help people learn about and implement new farming practices and
livestock discoveries, advances in home economics and to support 4-H clubs and other outreach to farms
and rural communities.

The Green Revolution goes global

Cross-breeding of corn was not the only yield-building game in town. Especially with countries in
Southeast Asia facing severe and chronic food shortages and starvation in the 1950s, governments and
plant breeders joined in the 1960s in aggressive rice and wheat breeding of hybrid and selective strains,
plus improving farming practices to boost crop yields and feed more people.

In 1960, the Philippines government joined with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and established a

rice breeding collaboration called the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Its first rice release,
IR8, called “miracle rice,” allowed the Philippines to more than double its average rice yield in about

two decades.

The IR8 variety led to other varieties of rice adapted to flourish in other countries in the region,
including Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Myanmar (then, Burma). A new dwarf variety,
IR36, was planted in India, and, when fertilized, it out-yielded other traditional rice by a factor of ten by
1968.

Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist who became known as the father of the Green Revolution,

was working with the Rockefeller Foundation to improve wheat varieties in the 1940s in Mexico, which
was succeeding in its own wheat improvement program. He went to India in 1961 at the government’s

request and began improving wheat to relieve hunger there, importing seed developed by breeders with
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

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