Monthly Archives: June 2025

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One man saved more lives than anyone else in history . . .

A billion lives, it is said.

Official portrait of Norman Borlaug for his Nobel Peace Prize.

And that man was Dr Norman Ernest Borlaug (1914-2009), an agricultural scientist from northeast Iowa, whose research to develop short-strawed and high-yielding varieties staved off predicted widespread famines in the 1960s.

It was the beginning of an international effort to enhance agricultural productivity that endures to this day through the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research or CGIAR, one of which is CIMMYT¹ (the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement in Mexico) where Borlaug spent many years as Director of the International Wheat Improvement Program (now the Global Wheat Program).

Dr Borlaug was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work to promote global food supply, an act that contributes greatly to peace. And for having given a well-founded hope – the green revolution.

The expression “the green revolution” is permanently linked to Norman Borlaug’s name. He obtained a PhD in plant protection [from the University of Minnesota] at the age of 27, and worked in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s to make the country self-sufficient in grain. Borlaug recommended improved methods of cultivation, and developed a robust strain of wheat – dwarf wheat – that was adapted to Mexican conditions. By 1956 the country had become self-sufficient in wheat.

Success in Mexico made Borlaug a much sought-after adviser to countries whose food production was not keeping pace with their population growth. In the mid-1960s, he introduced dwarf wheat into India and Pakistan, and production increased enormously. The expression “the green revolution” made Borlaug’s name known beyond scientific circles, but he always emphasized that he himself was only part of a team. (Source: www.nobelprize.org).

You can read his Nobel Prize lecture here.

Almost thirty years later, Borlaug returned to Oslo and reflected (in this lecture) on the progress that had been made since his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

He received many other awards in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977) and the Congressional Gold Medal (2006), one of only seven individuals worldwide to receive all three awards².

His is one of two Iowa statues in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall, unveiled in 2014 and replacing one of the state’s existing statues. It was sculpted by Benjamin Victor. A duplicate stands on the University of Minnesota campus in St Paul, outside the building named in his honour.

He founded the World Food Prize in 1986, a prestigious, international award given each year to honor the work of great agricultural scientists working to end hunger and improve the food supply.

It was initially sponsored and formed by businessman and philanthropist John Ruan Sr with support from the Governor and State Legislature of Iowa. Since 1987, there have been 55 laureates from 21 countries.

On 9 June 2017, Steph and I were on the last day of a 10 day road trip that had taken us from Atlanta, Georgia down to the coast at Savannah, then up through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and back to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Almost 2800 miles.

We’d spent our last night in a suburb of Iowa City before setting off north to St Paul the following morning. In a little under 3 hours, we found ourselves in Cresco, the county seat of Howard County (just south of the state line with Minnesota) in the lovely Bluff Country that encompasses northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and southwest Wisconsin.

On the eastern outskirts of Cresco we came across this large billboard beside the road.

Anyway, as I stopped to take a photograph, I recalled having caught a glimpse—some miles south of Cresco—of a signpost to the ‘Borlaug Birthplace Farm’. Well, being somewhat pressed for time (and having another 180 miles to complete our journey to St Paul), we didn’t turn round and explore.

So it was just a vague hope that someday I might return, since I had met Dr Borlaug in April 1999 when he visited the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, another of the CGIAR centers) in the Philippines where I was working at the time. It was a hope recently fulfilled.

Explaining how rice seeds are stored in the International Rice Genebank to Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug

Earlier this year, I had contacted Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa asking if Steph and I could have a ‘behind-the-scenes’ visit during our vacation in the USA, a vacation we have just returned from. It was then I discovered that Cresco was just a short drive west from Decorah, and I contemplated whether a tour of the Borlaug Birthplace and Boyhood Farms might be feasible.

So I contacted the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation (NBHF, set up in 2000) and very quickly received a reply that NBHF board members would be delighted to arrange a tour.

And that’s what we did on 3 June, setting off from Decorah in time to meet up with board members Tom Spindler (Tours) and Gary Gassett (Co-Treasurer) at the Borlaug Boyhood Farm.

NBHF board members Gary Gassett (L) and Tom Spindler (R) in the old school room on the Borlaug boyhood farm site.

Norman Borlaug came from humble beginnings, the great-grandson of Norwegian immigrants in the late 19th century.

Norman’s grandparents, Emma and Nels (and others of the Borlaug clan) settled in the Cresco area. They had three sons: Oscar, Henry (Norman’s father, second from left), and Ned.

Henry married Clara Vaala, and after Norman was born on 25 March 1914 in his grandparents house, the family lived there for several years. Norman had three younger sisters, Palma Lilian, Charlotte, and Helen (who was born and died in 1921).

The house is currently not open for visitors, as several parts are undergoing extensive repair and renovation.

Henry and Clara bought a small plot of land (around 200 acres) less than a mile from their parent’s farm, but until he was 8, Norman continued to live with his grandparents. By then, in 1922, Henry and Clara had built their own home, ordered from Sears, Roebuck of Chicago. The original flatpack!

Life must have been hard on the Borlaug farm, the winters tough. Heating for the house came solely from the stove in the kitchen with warm(er) air rising to the four bedrooms bedrooms upstairs through a metal grill in the ceiling. There was an outhouse privy some 15 m or so from the back porch.

Besides the kitchen, with its hand pump to deliver water for washing, the other room on the ground floor was a combined parlour cum dining room.

Norman’s bedroom
The view over the farm from Norman’s bedroom

On the front of the house there is a set of steps leading to a porch along the width of the house. Mature pine trees now surround the house, with a row to the front of the house planted by Norman when he was studying for his BS in forestry at the University of Minnesota (only later did he turn to plant pathology for his graduate studies).

On the farm, Henry eventually built a barn in 1929 to house their livestock There is a long chicken coop, beside which is a bronze statue of Norman as a boy feeding the chickens. It was created by Dr Bill Faller and donated to the NBHF, as was another nearby depicting Norman’s work around the world.

In one outhouse there’s a nice memento of Norman’s boyhood here: his initials inscribed on a wall.

It’s said that Norman was an average student. From an early age, until Grade 8, he joined his classmates (of both Lutheran Norwegian and Catholic Czech descent – Czechs had settled in the area of Protivin and Spillville west of the Borlaug farms) in a one room schoolroom (built in 1865) that was originally located about a mile away from the farm. Norwegian children on one side of the room, the Czechs on the other.

At that time, most pupils reaching Grade 8 would leave full-time education and return to working on the family farm. But Norman’s teacher at the time, his cousin Sina Borlaug (right), encouraged both parents and grandparents to permit Norman to attend high school in Cresco. Which he did, boarding with a family there Monday to Friday, returning home each weekend to take on his fair share of the farm chores.

And the rest is history, so to speak. He eventually made it to the University of Minnesota in St Paul to study forestry, spending some time working in that field before completing (in 1942) his PhD on variation and variability in the pathogen that causes flax wilt, Fusarium lini (now F. oxysporum f.sp. lini).

He joined a small group of scientists on a Rockefeller Foundation funded project in Mexico in 1944, and remained in Mexico until he retired. Among these colleagues was potato pathologist, Dr John Niederhauser, who became a colleague of mine as we developed a regional potato program (PRECODEPA) in the late 1970s.

Borlaug and Niederhauser were very keen baseball fans, and they introduced Little League Baseball to Mexico. That achievement is mentioned in one of the posters (below) in the Borlaug home, and our two NBHF guides, Tom and Garry, were surprised to learn that not only had I met Borlaug, but had worked with Niederhauser as well.

Active to the end of his life, Dr Borlaug passed away in Texas on 12 September 2009. His ashes were scattered at several places, including the Iowa farms.

To the end of his life he was passionate about the need for technology to enhance agricultural productivity. And one point of view remained as strong as ever: peace and the eradication of human misery were underpinned by food security.

It was a fascinating tour of the Borlaug Birthplace and Boyhood Farms, and Steph and I are grateful to Tom and Garry for taking the time (over 2.5 hours) to give us a personal tour.

The NBHF has several programs, including internships and one designed especially for schoolchildren to make them aware of Borlaug’s legacy, and why it is important. You can find much more information on the Foundation website.

¹ Many of Dr Borlaug’s day-to-day belongings (including his typewriter) are displayed in the office suite he occupied at CIMMYT. The photos are courtesy of two former IRRI colleagues, plant breeder Dr Mark Nas and Finance Manager Remy Labuguen who now work at CIMMYT.

Dr Borlaug stepped down as head of CIMMYT’s wheat program around 1982, but he remained as active as ever. He especially enjoyed spending time with trainees, passing on his wealth of knowledge about wheat improvement to the next generation of breeders and agronomists.

In this photo, he is showing trainees how to select viable seeds at CIMMYT’s Obregon Wheat Research Station in the spring of 1992.

One of my colleagues at IRRI, Gene Hettel, was the communications specialist in the wheat program at CIMMYT between 1986 and 1995.

Gene told me that Borlaug’s office was directly above mine—that made it handy for when he had editorial chores for me. Sometimes he would call me up to his office if he had a really big job—maybe a major book chapter to edit. Other times he dropped by my office with a grin on his face: “Are you busy?”

Here they are together in the wheat plots just outside their offices to get away from all the paperwork and just “talk” to the plants!

² The other six are: Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Martin Luther King Jr (USA), Mother Teresa (Albania-India), Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh), Elie Wiesel (USA), and Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar). Mohammad Yunus (currently Chief Advisor of the interim government of Bangladesh) was a member of IRRI’s Board of Trustees (1989 to 1994) when I joined the institute in 1991.

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Saving seeds, linking generations . . .

If you’ve never been to Seed Savers Exchange near Decorah in the lovely Bluff Country of northeast Iowa, then you should. Especially as it is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Founded in 1975 (originally as True Seed Exchange) by Kent and Diane Ott Whealy in Missouri, Seed Savers Exchange is a tax-exempt 501(c)3 non-profit that conserves and promotes America’s culturally diverse but endangered garden and food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants.

In this video, Diane Ott Whealy describes how it all began.

Seed Savers Exchange moved to Decorah in 1987, when the Whealys bought a parcel of land, which became Heritage Farm.

Over five decades, Seed Savers Exchange has built an impressive community (in reality a movement) of gardeners and seed stewards, sharing and swapping unique varieties you might not find anywhere else, combining in situ conservation in home gardens and ex situ in the seedbank at Decorah.

Varieties such as these (of the many thousands in the Exchange network and collection):

  • Cherokee Trail of Tears, a snap bean carried by the Cherokee over the Trail of Tears, the infamous death march from the Smoky Mountains to Oklahoma in 1838-39);
  • Bull Nose Bell, a sweet pepper introduced into North America in the 1700s, and grown by elder statesman and third POTUS, Thomas Jefferson, in his garden at Monticello in 1812);
  • or the tomato variety German Pink (one of two varieties that started it all – the other being Grandpa Ott’s, a morning glory) introduced into the USA from Bavaria in the late 19th century. Both are featured on the covers of The Exchange 2025 Yearbook and The 2025 Seed Catalog.

There’s lots to see and do at Seed Savers Exchange (click on the image below – and others with a red border – to open a larger version) and visitors are encouraged to hike the trails, and explore the 890 acre farm.

When the apples are ripe in the Historic Orchard, visitors may pick their own. Local cider producers make a beeline to harvest and collect windfalls.

But Seed Savers Exchange is not all plants. The Ancient White Park cattle were introduced into the USA from the UK during WWII as a safeguard against loss of this ancient breed. Several herds were established, two ending up in Decorah. Coincidentally, not far from where we are now living in the northeast of England, there is a completely feral (but enclosed) herd of these beautiful cattle at Chillingham.

During our recent trip to the USA, Steph and I enjoyed a day-long visit to Seed Savers Exchange, staying a couple of nights in Decorah. It was an easy drive south from St Paul, MN (just under 160 miles, and about 3.5 hours on a sunny Sunday afternoon).

A visit to Seed Savers Exchange was first mooted in May 2024, but having just made a long road trip across Utah and Colorado, I really didn’t want to get behind the wheel again. However, we had no epic road trip plans this year, so I decided to contact Executive Director, Mike Bollinger (right) last February to set up a visit.

Regular readers of my blog will know that Steph and I first became part of the germplasm conservation movement in the early 1970s. I spent much of my career in international agricultural research and academia, collecting farmer varieties of potatoes across the Andes of Peru, and in the Philippines managing the world’s largest genebank for rice at the International Rice Research Institute.

So I asked Mike if we could have a ‘behind-the-scenes’ visit (not open to regular visitors), to learn about the organization in detail, and the management of such a large and diverse collection of plant species. He quickly agreed, and asked Director of Preservation, Michael Washburn (right) to set up a program for us.

In this post I’m not going to describe how Seed Savers Exchange works with its members, and how they share seeds among the community or from the seedbank. That information is available in detail on this section of its website.

Incidentally, Seed Savers Exchange also has a commercial arm (which supports its non-profit mission), selling seeds through an annual catalog of around 600 or so varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers, some of which come from the collection.

Michael introduced us to the preservation team (see below), and we spent time with each as well as having a very informative round table discussion where we shared our different perspectives and experiences in seed conservation.

Let me highlight some fundamental differences between managing (as I did) the rice collection at IRRI and the collection at Seed Savers Exchange.

IRRI’s collection of rice has its own complexities due to its size and the origin of the germplasm from many countries, with conservation and exchange subject to the rules of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

On the other hand, Seed Savers Exchange is a voluntary non-profit, operating within the USA, and not subject to the same bureaucratic constraints. However, its complexity lies with the number of species conserved (and their conservation needs), as well as catering to the needs of the many members in the Exchange network.

Standing (L-R): Heidi Betz (seed bank inventory technician), Maddison MacDonald (potato tissue culture lab manager), Briana Smorstad ( seed bank manager), Jamie Hanson (orchard manager), Sara Straate (seed historian), Natalie Aird (seed bank inventory coordinator), and Michael Washburn. Kneeling: Eduardo Fernandez (assistant seed historian). Seated (L-R): me, Josie Flatgrad (membership and exchange coordinator), and Steph.

Seed bank manager Briana Smorstad explained that the Seed Savers Exchange Collection has around 20,000 accessions (although the database lists many more that are no longer available). About 6000 (about 30% of the collection) are distributable accessions.

This is the scope of the collection, as defined in its 2013 Accessions Policy (updated in 2020):

As with any genebank, this one has its issues with ‘duplicate’ varieties (some with the same name but not necessarily the same variety, and others with different names) currently estimated at around 21% of the collection. Fortunately, and as we all agreed in our round table, Seed Savers Exchange does have a comprehensive database (developed in Microsoft Access) that keeps track of all the germplasm, its status, and where it actually sits in the cold stores (so can be quickly accessed). In the past year, some 4922 varieties were offered through the Exchange. However, if one of the members is listing any variety the Decorah team don’t list these for distribution.

In the ‘active collection’ with seed bank manager Briana Smorstad.

Natalie Aird, the seed bank inventory coordinator (who showed us the database) handles the seed quality assessments, running routine germination tests according to well-established protocols. And these important data guide how and when seeds become available for distribution.

Natalie demonstrating the seed germination test for bean seeds, and the incubator for the tests.

We were especially privileged to be shown the base collection cold store (at around -18°C).

A recent initiative was launched, known as the L-to-D Project (Legacy to Distribution) which has moved 70 varieties in the collection into the Exchange.

The collection has Distributable or D varieties with sufficient seeds to meet regular requests through the Exchange. To have enough seeds means regeneration and multiplication on the Heritage Farm, which is time-, space, and labor-intensive. However, a whole series of seed packets or Legacy (L) accessions were identified in the collection, which were tested for quality and germination, and if reaching the desired standard were moved on to the D list, as was the case with the 70 varieties mentioned above. The project is described in more detail here.

And to safeguard the collection decades into the future, Seed Savers Exchange has sent seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault every year since the vault was first opened in 2008. Here’s a brief report from a Crop Trust news article in early June.

Here are the seedbank team (L-R, Natalie, Heidi, and Briana) preparing to send seeds to Svalbard earlier this year.

Seed Savers Exchange faces particular challenges with two components of its collection, namely the potato varieties, and the apple trees in the Heritage Orchard, which are maintained vegetatively.

In the case of potatoes, curated by Maddison MacDonald, there are 18 US heirloom varieties, 72 historic heirloom varieties, 10 exchange heirlooms. But the number of accessions is much higher. All maintained a virus-free tissue cultures. Potato varieties are distributed as tissue cultures, illustrated below.

One of the collection advisers (and former head of the genebank at the International Potato Center) Dr David Ellis has identified a group of 53 varieties (a core, so-to-speak) that represent the genetic diversity of the whole potato collection. But there is almost no overlap with the heirloom varieties mentioned earlier. The heirloom varieties meet the strict acquisition criteria for the collection and therefore have the highest priority. Managing a smaller number of priority varieties would permit greater focus on those. And, quite independently from David Ellis, I did suggest that Maddison should consider converting many of the other varieties to true potato seed, and in this way conserving the genetic diversity of the collection if not the individual clones.

The collection has an apple orchard with 1042 trees, consisting of 337 unique named varieties, managed by Jamie Hanson (below) and an assistant.

But there are duplicate trees, and these have been identified by DNA fingerprinting through Washington State University’s MyFruitTree initiative (at a cost of just $50 per sample). For example, fingerprinting has identified seven Bethel trees in the orchard, which will permit, in the future, removal of duplicate trees as part of orchard management. Jamie also curates a legacy grape breeding collection from the University of Minnesota.

I was particularly impressed by the outreach program involved in distributing apple varieties, whereby online tuition in grafting is given and the necessary tools also sent with the rootstocks and scions.

Besides conserving the seeds and vegetatively-propagated species at Seed Savers Exchange, there is also coordination of the membership and Exchange (the gardener-to-gardener seed swap) a role that falls to Josie Flatgrad (right).

Each year the Yearbook is published, a comprehensive tome of 474 pages! What a treasure trove of germplasm detail.

It has all the listings of varieties (this link explains how to read the listings) available from members, Seed Savers Exchange, details of the person offering seeds (some of whom have been listing seeds for more than 30 years), as well as a description of each variety. And to illustrate, here is the listing for Cherokee Trail of Tears (and also its catalog description) offered by members in California, Missouri, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

Following a lively round-table discussion with everyone who we met, Steph and I toured the Lillian Goldman Visitors Center (named after the philanthropist whose daughter Amy Goldman Fowler is a Special Advisor to Seed Savers Exchange Board of Directors), and the Iowa heritage barn (beside which Grandpa Ott’s morning glory were just beginning to climb), and the lovely garden in front that Diane Ott Whealy designed and looks after.

We are extremely grateful to Mike Bollinger and the whole Seed Savers Exchange team for their hospitality, their collegiality, and open discussions. We thoroughly enjoyed our six hours at Seed Savers Exchange, and hope to visit again in the future. And even though I spent most of my career in genetic conservation and use, I learned much that was new to me on this visit. It was an experience I shall cherish.

But let me finish this post by pointing you to this page on the Seed Savers Exchange website where there are numerous stories about a range of heirloom varieties and some of the stewards who make conservation of these varieties possible.

Inspirational indeed!