Plant Breeding

Traditional farming methods can only produce a limited amount of biomass to feed humans and animals. Better farm management and bringing more land under cultivation can raise yields, but only up to a point. Plant breeding, as a technology, has been responsible for far greater and more lasting increases in yield.

The Green Revolution

Almost everyone in India has heard of the Green Revolution — the period during which the country moved from struggling to feed its own population to being able to export food grain. This transformation depended heavily on plant breeding techniques, which were used to develop high-yielding, disease-resistant varieties of wheat, rice, maize …