We went to the home of the green revolution today , anyone who believes that one person can't make a difference needs to visit the international Maize and Wheat Improvement centre.(CIMMYT) This centre was the brainchild of Dr Norman E. Borlaug who in the 1940's decided there had to be better was to breed crops for human consumption and help to aliveate world hunger. We were given a look at the processes that are involved with breeding new and more productive crops, centring around bread wheat, in fact in the area of the Yaqui valley where 220,000 Ha of wheat are grown the average wheat yield has risen from 1.2 t/ha in 1959 to 6.5 t/ha in 2010. This research institution is owned by farmers and is driven by them from the ground up and on there Obregon sight that we were at today they have 300 ha and 40,000 trial plots, some of those plots where devoted to farming system trials that have been conducted for more than 20 years. The interesting thing is that they have identified four principals that are important for farming practices they are, controlled traffic, ground cover, break crops, minimum soil disturbance, even on the other side of the planet these principals are true.
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