Photo: Ben Zinner, USAID / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
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Every Iowa farm kid should know Norman Borlaug’s name.
Borlaug was born in 1914 on a farm near Cresco, in Howard County, and went to a one-room school. He wrestled and studied forestry and plant pathology at the University of Minnesota.
In Mexico in the 1940s and ’50s, he bred short-stemmed, disease-resistant wheat that produced far more grain. Those varieties went to India and Pakistan in the 1960s and helped head off famine. The work became known as the Green Revolution, and it won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
He founded the World Food Prize, which is awarded every October in Des Moines. Iowa placed his statue in the U.S. Capitol in 2014. He died in 2009 at 95.
Kim Sanders writes for Clarion News Online.