9. WILLINGNESS TO TAKE CHANCES – The Willingness to Take Chances of Norman Borlaug
Norman’s next step was to crossbreed the four just-discovered varieties with thousands of other types of wheat. Crossbreeding is combining one variety of wheat with another, hoping they will produce a new variant with favorable qualities. If he tried enough combinations, Norman knew would eventually end up with a variety that would produce an abundant number of grains and be resistant to stem rust. His chances of failure were high. As he said, “Crossbreeding is a hit-or-miss process. It’s time-consuming and mind-warpingly tedious. There’s only one chance in thousands of ever finding what you want, and actually no guarantee of success at all.”
To feed the planet, Norman needed a wheat variety that could be grown in different environments. This meant not only would he crossbreed his plants, but he would do it in two different regions with their own climates and soil, Bajĩo and Sonora, and he would do it in different growing seasons. In the spring, he’d plant and crossbreed the wheat in Bajĩo and harvest it in the fall. He would save the crop’s most promising variants and carry them to Sonora to be crossbred in the fall and harvested in the spring. Then he’d take the best back to Bajĩo and do it all over again. This was unheard of. Plants were supposed to be developed in one environment only. But this was another chance Norman was willing to take.
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