Earlier Green Revolution

It it possible to push back the start of the Green Revolution from the 1940s to the 1920s or even 1910s? The technology available wouldn't of course be capable of doing molecular genetics, and synthetic fertilizers were just coming out of the pipeline, but there seems to be less in the way of plant breeding for more modern-comparable cultivars of various grains.

Might it be possible then to accelerate agricultural research in this area then?
 
Henry A. Wallace began working with Hybrid corn in the early 1920's. Perhaps if he did even more with research in his tenure as Agriculture Secretary?
 

FDW

Banned
Yeah, you could have the US (or some university) establish some kind of important agricultural lab designed to create crops that can do things like grow in the Brazilian Cerrado.
 
A thing on the green revolution though is that some ecologists point it is not as green as pointed, and have actually an higher ecological price... surproduction and all.,..

If started earlier, with less known on ecological science... it could have unexpected bad price...
 
I don't know much about agriculture, but I recently finished reading a book about Henry Wallace, the father of crop hybridization. One of the things it talked about was how, prior to Wallace, efforts to breed corn focused on improving appearance, with the assumption yield would improve along with it. Wallace got his start in crop-breeding when, for a bet, he used statistical techniques to measure whether this was actually true, and discovered that, in fact, it wasn't. And this led to Wallace pioneering hybrid corn, which in turn led to the Green Revolution. This seems like the sort of insight someone could have had 10-20 years earlier.
 
I don't know much about agriculture, but I recently finished reading a book about Henry Wallace, the father of crop hybridization. One of the things it talked about was how, prior to Wallace, efforts to breed corn focused on improving appearance, with the assumption yield would improve along with it. Wallace got his start in crop-breeding when, for a bet, he used statistical techniques to measure whether this was actually true, and discovered that, in fact, it wasn't. And this led to Wallace pioneering hybrid corn, which in turn led to the Green Revolution. This seems like the sort of insight someone could have had 10-20 years earlier.
Perhaps Wallace's mentor, George Washington Carver?
 
A thing on the green revolution though is that some ecologists point it is not as green as pointed, and have actually an higher ecological price... surproduction and all.,..

If started earlier, with less known on ecological science... it could have unexpected bad price...

Sounds more like a recipe for a worse great depression and a longer lasting dustbowl...
 
Sounds more like a recipe for a worse great depression and a longer lasting dustbowl...

Yeah, the spoiling and wasting of agricultural lands is a danger still frequently forgotten.. China is paying the price for it, and get yearly duststorms all the way to *Beijing* blowing.. heck, the dust get to S. Korea, I heard...
 
Yeah, the spoiling and wasting of agricultural lands is a danger still frequently forgotten.. China is paying the price for it, and get yearly duststorms all the way to *Beijing* blowing.. heck, the dust get to S. Korea, I heard...
To be fair, Wallace and others in the Agriculture department did their best to discourage soil erosion...and they were quite successful, for the most part. (Wallace even brought it up in his speeches, like here:
http://newdeal.feri.org/wallace/haw11.htm
)
Of course, to help fight it, they brought in kudzu...
 
Yeah, good points. Albeit... It should be perhaps said... The recent rise of biological farming, 'peasants agriculture' (in europe but beyond, like there with the Union Paysanne), the rising critics of industrial farming and elevage, etc... It is not just reforms of the Green Revolution maybe, but a whole denunciation of it, of it' dark side and faillings.,..

And if this is right, and briought earlier... at first, good.. but the current issues may be even worse...
 
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