Even though he was strapped to a plow and tugging at it with all his might, and even though his clothes, nose, and eyes were full of hot dust, he knew it was a chance he had to take. It was April 1945, and Norman Borlaug had just been sent to Mexico City and put in charge of a program to help farmers get better results from their wheat crops. Now, here he was with two assistants in the hot sun, turning the first few yards of soil by hand. They had five miles of plowing to go.
Norman grew up in Iowa on his family’s 106-acre farm and stud- ied forestry and plant diseases in college. He knew exactly what healthy plants looked like. When he arrived in Mexico, he found crops that were small and sickly. But the most worrying thing he found, the reason wheat crops were shrinking every year and families in Mexico were going hungry, was a plant disease called stem rust. Norman knew the most important thing to do was to solve this problem. This meant finding a type of wheat resistant to the disease that could grow well in the Bajĩo region, the highlands northwest of Mexico City. This was easier said than done.
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