In mankind’s ancient history, up until civilization emerged about 12,000 years ago, our primary food sources were meat and fish. This high-protein diet was necessary to sustain human growth and power our unusually large brains. Other foods, such as berries, nuts, and roots, served as small snacks to tide us over between meat-based meals.
After a time, agriculture began to take off, allowing us to exploit the nutrient sources in plants far more effectively than mere gathering would allow. Today, grains supply 70% of the food energy that feeds humanity. In the mid 20th century, farmers were already exploiting about 10% of the earth’s landmass for growing crops, and further expansion seemed doubtful, as the new lands have poor characteristics for farming. The only alternative was to increase yields on the farmland we already had.
In the decades after WWII, we developed techniques to permit higher crop yields, significantly increasing worldwide food production and allowing our global exponential population growth to continue unhindered. The two main fields that experienced rapid advancements were plant genetics and synthetic fertilizers. These advancements and their consequences are so significant that they were given a name: the green revolution.
As part of the green revolution, synthetic fertilizers were mass produced using new nitrogen-fixation techniques, mainly derivatives of the Haber-Bosch process. In the Haber-Bosch process, atmospheric nitrogen is processed into usable fertilizer at high temperatures and pressures. This released our dependency on preexisting sources of fixed nitrogen, such as bat guano, which had to be exported all over the world from South America prior to synthetic fertilizers. The green revolution changed all this.
Beginning in the mid-1940s, botanists experienced breakthroughs in their understand of plant genetics and began to breed strains of wheat that vastly increased production. Mexico alone experienced a threefold growth in wheat production between 1944 and 1964. The 1970 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Norman E. Borlaug for his work on increasing crop productivity. In the 1960s, the so-called “miracle rice,” IR-8, was planted worldwide, allowing rice production like never before – the green revolution.
Part of the advantage of these new plants was that they flowered more easily than previous strains. Wheat and rice require a certain number of light hours per day – called the photoperiod – in order to flower and begin producing grain. New strains developed as part of the green revolution decreased the necessary sun exposure per day, allowing crops to be planted and harvested more quickly, and in a wider range of climactic and seasonal conditions. These advances particularly benefited the poorer nations of the world, who lack advanced agricultural technology but have ample farmland to plant any seeds available on the world market. These nations benefitted the most from the green revolution.