The story of wheat

A very interesting article on how wheat has been man's friend since the last 10,000 years. As soon as humans began making stone tools and took to cultivation, argiculture proved to be the answer to scarcity of meat during harsh climatic changes and cold winter months. Wheat farmers not only got stronger than their hunter-gatherer cousins, but their populations grew and spread, and they quickly became the predominant race. However, innovation in farming was slow. It took another couple of thousand years for cattle rearing to begin, and even more for the first plough to get invented. But human population was doubling at a much faster rate than wheat cultivation. In 1798, Malthus forecasted a population crash, but the crash was repeatedly avoided, first by bringing more land under cultivation in America and Australia, then by inventing the tractor, then by the discovery of nitrogenous fertiliers, and finally in the 1950s by Norman Borlaug who crossed different varieties of wheat to make it fungus-resistant. Borlaug was invited to India in 1961 by M. S. Swaminathan, and managed to adapt new varieties suited for the conditions of the Indian sub-continent. This started the Green Revolution and avoided mass starvation in India. But forecasts suggest that the world population will continue to grow until 2050 and will peak at 10 billion people. This will require further innovations in fertilizers, pestisides, and genetic modifications because "feeding 10 billion people will require at least 35% more calories than the world's farmers grow today, and probably more if these 10 billion people are to have meat more than once a month (it takes 10 calories of wheat to produce 1 calorie of meat)".