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So, with whom do we kick
off this historic series? In his book,
An Adventure in Applied
Science: a History of the International Rice Research Institute, Dr.
Robert Chandler, Jr., when allocating credit for the creation of
IR8, the first Green Revolution variety, wrote:
“[Dr. Peter] Jennings for selecting
the parents and making the cross, [Dr. Hank] Beachell for
identifying IR8-288-3 from the multitude of segregating lines, and
[Dr. T.T.] Chang for having brought to the immediate
attention of IRRI breeders at the start the value of the short-statured
varieties from Taiwan…”
Dr. Jennings is the only one of these three still with us, so we
cannot think of a more fitting choice than IRRI's first rice breeder. He
talks about predestination, fate, and luck and just how was a young
breeder to increase Asian rice yields back in 1961.
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Interview video: Part 1
Interview video: Part 2
Peter Jennings:
Luck is the residue of design
Dr. Peter
Jennings, IRRI’s first rice breeder (1961-67) with a long career in
Latin America after his work in Asia, kicks off this historic series
with a singular wit. He played a major role in the development of IR8,
the rice variety that would ultimately change the face of agriculture
across Asia (see
Breeding History
on pages 34-38 of Rice Today Vol. 5, No. 4). He reminisced on a
warm, muggy day (20 July 2007) at his home in Gainesville, Florida. This
is an edited version of the entire interview.
On coming to IRRI
I have a profound belief in predestination and fate. I have many
examples of that which confirm in my mind that it operates. I started
graduate school at Purdue in 1953. I was there almost 3½ years for my
masters and doctorate. The second year I was there, a Mexican kid—Ignacio
Narvaez—was in the office opposite mine. Nacho was a wheat
breeder for the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture associated with the
[Nobel Laureate Norman] Borlaug group and he talked about Mexico and his
work. I said to myself I want to do this. I want to work in
international agriculture. I was consumed by this. But everything I
tried—everything possible—to become affiliated with the Rockefeller
Foundation. It was useless. Nothing happened, nothing worked. They just
didn’t need another plant pathologist at the time.
So, I
finished in 1957. Jobs were scarce. There was no such thing as a postdoc
in those days. You went directly to employment, hopefully. There was one
job available, in Madison, Wisconsin, a forage pathologist for the USDA.
I went there and was offered the job. I went back to Purdue, where I
lacked one form for my doctoral thesis. So I went to the office of the
dean of the School of Agriculture to pick up this form. It just so
happened that while I was talking to the secretary, Dean Ernest C.
Young—who had been a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation for years
and he knew me because of my frustrated attempts to get into the
Foundation—walked by. “Peter, what are you going to do?” he
asked.
“Well, Dean,” I said, “I’m going to go to Wisconsin.”
“ Didn’t
you want to work with Rockefeller?” he responded.
“Yes,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
The dean walked into his office, picked up the phone, and
called
George Harrar [then RF’s director for agriculture and later RF
president, 1961-72, photo left]. He left the door open so I could hear.
“George,” he said. “I’ve got a kid here. He set some sort
of an academic record here at Purdue and he wants to work for you
and what are you going to do about it?”
“Let me talk to him,” said Harrar.
We had two phone conversations, that day and the subsequent
day, which led to employment with Rockefeller.
During those conversations, George said something I never
forgot. He said: “Would you want to live in the Philippines?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
That night, I had to look in my atlas to see exactly where
in the Pacific the Philippines were.
“Well, we’re going to do something there,” Harrar said.
“It’s going to take 3 or 4 years t o get organized. Meanwhile, we’ll have
to find something for you to do.”
On that basis, I got a job. Terrific! What’s the significance
of this? This was 1957. Bob [1st IRRI Director General Robert F.]
Chandler’s book [An
Adventure in Applied Research] goes back to 1958—a year and
a half later! And that’s when all this started. Ford to Rockefeller,
Rockefeller to Ford, and the two institutions and (the government of)
the Philippines going through the process.
George Harrar had this in his mind a year and a half before whe n
he had talked to me specifically about rice and the Philippines. You
don’t see that in Chandler’s book. The driving force behind this whole
IRRI was George Harrar. Much more than
Frosty [Forrest F., Ford Foundation vice president of overseas
development] Hill [who served for 14 years as chair of IRRI’s
Board; photo right], I think, who played an immeasurably important role.
George Harrar: he was magnificent, a giant!
So, that was 1957, early in the spring. I was in
Rockefeller. It was projected that I would end up sometime in the
Philippines. They didn’t know what to do with me so I went to Mexico for
a while. Then, there was a rice hoja blanca
virus [RHBV] epidemic in Colombia and I was told to get myself
down there and take a look and identify it. So, I flew down to Colombia
with the head of the rice investigations, USDA, and, sure enough, it was
hoja blanca. I knew because I’d been to Cuba the previous summer and
that led to my immediate transfer to Colombia. And then, 3 ½ to 4 years
later, IRRI was then in the process of starting its activities and I was
transferred there. That was 1961, October. The previous year, I had made
a long trip to Asia with Sterling Wortman [see below on page 11]. From
the day I joined Rockefeller, it was understood I would go to IRRI.
On becoming IRRI’s first
plant breeder
 One thing no one seems to remember is that I was destined to go to
IRRI as a plant pathologist, not as a plant breeder. I was pretty much
accepted by everyone for this role. Sterling Wortman and I made that
Asian trip. We started in Japan, went through Taiwan, and hit the
Philippines. George Harrar and Bob Chandler were there. We all drove out
to Los Baños to see the site. Again, it came up that I would transfer to
IRRI as the plant pathologist. Sterling had to stay in Manila that week
for some reason and I continued on to Bangkok to meet the Thais and see
what they were doing in rice. I met
S.H. Ou [photo, left] and after a day or two with him I thought
to myself: this guy is vastly more experienced in rice pathology than I
am. He’d be ideal for the pathologist at IRRI. Sterling came in to
Bangkok to meet me, where we continued to travel on to Sri Lanka. I told
Sterling that I found IRRI a plant pathologist.
“If you’re
interested to interview this man, I think he will be grand,” I said. “If
you pick him up as plant pathologist, I’ll move over and do the plant
breeding.”
That’s exactly how it happened. So, I became the
breeder—the only breeder on the senior staff. That’s IRRI history.
Strange coincidence.
Challenges as IRRI’s
first breeder: four problems to resolve
I spent a little time looking and thinking. It seemed to me
there were four problems that had to be resolved. If we could solve
those problems, there was a pretty high probability of doing something
important. If we couldn’t solve those problems, there wouldn’t be much
progress made.
Availability of germplasm. The first problem was
availability of germplasm. When I got to IRRI in October 1961, someone
had put together a collection of popular rice varieties grown throughout
Asia. There were some 300 odd varieties and that’s all we ha d for the
germplasm of IRRI. I spent a lot of time wandering back and forth in the mud
trying to look at these plants. Sterling Wortman, particularly, kept
saying that we had to get more germplasm. So, we got from the IRRI
librarian, Lina Manalo, a list of rice workers or experiment stations of
some 60 countries. I drafted a letter and I asked T.T. Chang [IRRI
geneticist, 1962-91, photo right] to co-sign this letter that
requested any germplasm [in small seed samples] they would be willing to
share with us.
These were the days when
it was pretty easy to move germplasm from one country to another—very
few regulations on quarantine, etc., that impedes work. The response was
wonderful. Within months, boxes and boxes of seed packages were coming
in. I guess within 2 or 3 years we had several thousand accessions.
Breeding was getting more and more active and all this
germplasm was more than I could manage, so T.T. Chang took it on from
there. That was the first round. We got a lot of germplasm and that led
to the very well-known and well-maintained seed bank at IRRI. So, that
was r elatively easy; it just took some time. The second and third
problems are going to appear to be awfully minute, but I still consider
that, if they had not been solved, IRRI would not have had a breeding
program.
Making a cross—Hank Beachell style. That second
problem was: How do you make crosses in rice? When I left Purdue and got
picked up by Rockefeller, I had no experience with rice so they sent me
for 4 months to the southern United States, Arkansas; Beaumont, Texas;
and Louisiana, to learn as much as I could before I went on to Mexico.
One day, I was in Beaumont, I asked
Hank Beachell [later to be IRRI’s second rice breeder, 1963-72;
photo left]:
How do you make crosses? He said, “Well, come on, we’ll go to the field
and make a cross.” So, we get in the pickup truck and head out. He had a
couple of thermos bottles with him. And he had a little wooden stand. He
took those thermos bottles and his wooden stand out into the mud in the
field and he found some variety that he would use as a female parent. He
set the stand up there and he put at the top a thermos bottle that had
hot water or hot air, I can’t remember which—something like 44 degrees
centigrade. It was a standard method of emasculating. So, he very
carefully got ahold of one culm, bent it over very gently so he wouldn’t
snap it, inserted it into the thermos bottle, left it there for 10
minutes, and it worked! It emasculated and we came back the next day and
pollinated. Well, I looked at that and said to myself, “That’s trash.
It’s ridiculous! Do one panicle at a time and then you got to go back to
reheat the water. What’s going on here? Nonsense.” Of course, I didn’t
say that [directly to Beachell].
Crossing rice plants using the wheat example.
Anyway, I went on to Mexico; I didn’t have to make crosses there. I was
just trying to get a Mexican rice program started. Very quickly, they
transferred me to Colombia. Now, I had to start breeding for hoja blanca
resistance. How am I going to make crosses? I was not going to use a
thermos bottle! So, I had some good friends in the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Colombian Agriculture Program. There were about 18–20 of
us. One wheat breeder from my undergraduate days showed me how he made
crosses in wheat. He got a pair of scissors and we went out to the
greenhouse. He took a spike of wheat and he started—clip, clip, clip,
clip—like that. In 2 minutes, he had emasculated a wheat spike. Look at
that. I thought that should work in rice too. And it did! Just clipping!
So, all the crosses I made in Colombia before I went to IRRI were made
through clipping. Then, you take out the remnants of the anthers and
pollinate the next day. A piece of cake! You could do dozens and dozens
of panicles in a day and it had lots of advantages and no defects as far
as I could tell.
Clipping at IRRI and writing it up. Okay, so I got
to IRRI and decided I was going to clip and not fool around with thermos
bottles. The first trainees, I think the term today is scholars, were
three Thai kids that came to IRRI into our department. I grabbed two of
them and Dr. Chang got one. I gave Manee Chuaviroj, one of the Thai trainees,
20 or 25 varieties and a list of crosses to make using all possible
combinations in the screen house. This involved several hundred crosses.
Manee
kept a careful record of how many panicles and florets were clipped, how
many were pollinated, and how many seed sets were there. Some 6,000
emasculations were done and the seed set was perfect, excellent. We had
all kinds of weird combinations—indicas, japonicas, tall, short,
whatever. No problem.
We wrote this up as a little article and sent it to Crop
Science. [Jennings
PR, Beachell HM, Chuaviroj M. 1964. An improved rice hybridization
technique. Crop Science 4:524-526]. That clipping method
with certain improvements made over the years, I think, is still the
standard worldwide for emasculating rice. And it replaced very quickly
using hot air or water in a thermos bottle. This may seem small, but it
was absolutely critical! So that, in retrospect, was easy.
 Breaking
grain dormancy. The third problem that I saw was related to
grain dormancy. If you are going to have a program in the tropics, then
you’re going to plant two crops a year. You’ve got to have a way of
breaking dormancy. If you don’t, what you harvest today and replant to
get the two crops in, the only stuff that’s going to germinate is the
nondormant. Well, how do you break dormancy? No one I talked to could
tell exactly how to do that. So, I went to the U.P. College of
Agriculture and talked to Pedro B. Escuro [later an IRRI plant breeder
in Burma, 1978-85; photo left], who was then head of the Plant Breeding Department
of the college.
“Pedro, how do you break dormancy?” I asked.
“No sweat,” he said.
He took me out and he showed me a 55-gallon oil drum in
which he had cut out a circular hole at the bottom, into which he could
put kindling so he could build a fi re in the drum. Halfway up this drum,
there was a screen mesh inserted, on top of which sacks of rice were
placed. He said the smoke filtering up breaks the dormancy. Now, this
got pretty weird because he insisted on having one specific species of
tree from which to get the kindling. Come on! This didn’t sound right to
me.
Anyway, I went back to IRRI and asked Joe de Jesus
[photo at right], who was one of
our first research assistants, to round up some incubators. Then, we got
a bunch of recently harvested rice varieties—I don’t remember how
many—and we stuck them into those incubators at different temperatures,
50 degrees, 45 degrees; and varying lengths of time, 2 days, 5 days, a
week. We broke the dormancy of practically everything at 50 degrees over
a week or so. That was it. We were ready to plant. Problem solved. I
wrote that up with Joe and again published it in Crop Science
[Jennings PR, de Jesus Jr. J. 1964. Effect of heat on breaking
dormancy in rice. Crop Science 4:530-533]. Well, one
might say this was pretty small, but there would not have been two rice
crops a year without this method. I’m very proud of these contributions
although you never hear about how to make a cross and how to break
dormancy.
Increasing yield. The fourth problem was
complicated. Chandler kept preaching: increase yield! Okay, that’s easy
to say, but how do you do it? There was a lot of debate even within
IRRI. Some contended the problem of the
miserable yields in Asia was largely agronomic. All you had to do was to
teach the farmers to plant a little better, use fertilizers a little
better, get the weeds o ut—something
like that—and the yields would go up. But that was not my job. My job
was breeding varieties. So, I assumed the problem was varieties. Well,
what are you going to breed for? What are the objectives here? Chandler
says high yield. Okay. How do you get high yield? Man, that was a
problem.
Fortunately, a great friend of mine came to IRRI in early
1962, Akira Tanaka. Tanaka was the head of IRRI’s Plant Physiology
Department [1962-66; at left in photo]. He was, by far,
the most experienced rice scientist at IRRI in those days. He was good.
His love was mineral nutrition, particularly deficiencies, but his job
at IRRI was really to take the tropical rice plant apart, analyze it—the
stems, the leaves, the architecture. Relate this to solar radiation, to
temperature, whatever. What’s going on with the plant? The population of
the rice plants in the field: why are they not yielding very well? We
had to try to understand that. His work was classic.
I spent a lot
of time just talking with Tanaka and I asked him, “Tell me, what does a
leaf look like on an ideal plant that is going to yield more?” We talked
about that. Then I asked, “Tell me about the stems, the culms; what
should they look like?” We were trying to develop a mental image in our
minds of what an ideal plant would look like. There was a little bit of
published information on plant type, particularly from Japan; not much,
but just enough to suggest to Tanaka and me that, if we were going to
make any progress, we had to change dramatically the plant type. So, we
had lots and lots of conversations. We were feeling our way. One feeds
the other, back and forth. I immensely appreciated those conversations.
The net result of all that was an image formed in my mind that I checked
out with Tanaka.
 The first seminar I gave at IRRI was on what an ideal plant
type had to look like if we were going to get higher yield. I wrote that
up and I sent it to Crop Science [Plant
type as a rice breeding objective, 4:13-15, 1964]. There were no
data, it was just philosophy. For some reason, Crop Science
published it. Years later, I reread that paper, long after
IR8 came out. And it just seemed to me that IR8 looks very much
like what we were theorizing.
But at that point, it was theory. We think this is what has to
happen—and then how are we going to do that? How are you going to change
a plant from here to here with all the changes in leaves, color, and
angles and all the other stuff?
Well, the rest is history and just sheer luck. And that goes
back to that first set of crosses from material that, I think, Sterling
Wortman had put together: 300 some varieties. In there were those three
famous Taiwan short-statured varieties [Dee-geo-woo-gen (photo above), Taichung Native
1, and I-geo-tze]. They looked terrible under Philippine conditions.
They were riddled with bacterial leaf blight. They were shaded by tall
things. They were sterile and miserable, but short! That first year,
with Rudy Aquino, another of our esteemed research assistants [1961-97;
photo right], came a list of about 38 crosses/combinations. About half
of them, I think, involved one or another of the three Taiwan short-statured
materials.
The IR8 story; my best day at IRRI
At
this point, I diverge from the commonly accepted story of how IR8 was
developed. Chandler wrote—and he had to—that these materials were called
to our (my) attention by T.T. Chang. No way, never! Nobody knew what
those three varieties had. No one, no Taiwanese; none of the Japanese
who had
.jpg) worked in Taiwan; no one had an idea about the inheritance of
being short. S.H. Ou didn’t know. He never talked to me about it. He had
come out of China before going to Taiwan. So, it was blind crossing with
tall plants, which were horrible and lodged, and plants that were
disease-susceptible, but short.
We grew out the F1s [first generation]—38
combinations, which is ridiculous by today’s standards. Thirty-eight
crosses in a year! Even in our little program in Colombia, we made a
thousand crosses a year. So, what were the odds of hitting anything with
38? I always figured that a pretty fair rice breeder had to make about
1,000 crosses for every variety released—at least! Thirty-eight—absurd!
But that’s what we had. So, we grew out the F1s; they were
terrible. They were worse than the parents themselves. They were
gigantic—6–7 feet tall. What are you going to do? That’s all we had. We
harvested the seed from each of these single crosses—38 populations.
And, for not having anything else, we had a large F2
population [second generation]—4,000–6,000 plants from each single
cross.
I had these two
Thai trainees. It was my practice, essentially every day, to get ahold
of these kids and go to the field and walk around to look at this stuff.
Anyway, we went out after transplanting. The first couple of weeks, we
saw the rice seedlings; nothing special. Then, maybe a month after
transplanting, one day we looked out there. The first cross was
tall—terrible. It was a jungle. It was bad, nothing, obviously. Then, we
came onto the first of the crosses that involved one of the three Taiwan
short-statured varieties. We looked down there. Something had happened!
It was an epiphany! I had never had an experience like it in my life
before or since. There were tall plants and there were short plants, but
there were no intermediate plants. They were either tall or short. And
the short ones were erect, darker green, had sturdy stems, and a high
number of tillers. So, I got the kids and we took off our sneakers and
we plowed into the mud. The two kids and I each took two rows and we
counted tall plants and short plants. Essentially, the ratio of tall to
short plants was 3 to 1—obviously, single-gene recessive for shortness!
It may sound something like arrogance, but I contend that I knew, at
that moment, the significance of this.
So, I did four things immediately after we got out of the
field. I got Tanaka and took him out to the field. He looked and said, “hai,
hai.” Then, I grabbed Sterling Wortman and Bob Chandler and took
those two guys out—this was the same day. I had to explain a little more
to them than I did to Tanaka, but they got it. Then, I sent a telegram
to [Hank] Beachell. I wrote, “I think I found a simply inherited
dwarfing gene that works because it turned out that the panicle was not
dwarfed.” There had been lots and lots of dwarfing genes, but they were
miserable because the panicle was dwarfed. That was the best day I had
at IRRI!
Obviously, my research assistants and I concentrated on the
small plants. We cut out all the tall plants so that the short ones
wouldn’t be terribly shaded. We just harvested the seed of the
individual short plants. And, on the 8th cross, IR8, which meant the 8th
cross made, I don’t know, for some reason, we picked up 300 to 400
plants. I’m sure that was a big step towards selection, which would give
300 to 400 F3 rows. We did the same with the other crosses.
Then, that now takes us into 1963. I was leaving on
sabbatical for various reasons. I just had to have a year away from
IRRI. And, to replace me, I had suggested to Chandler to bring in [Hank]
Beach ell.
When IRRI started, in the Varietal Improvement Department, there were
three senior scientist positions allocated: a breeder (myself), a
geneticist [Chang], and a cytogeneticist. Well, I had a course in
cytogenetics at Purdue and I didn’t understand a thing from one semester
to the next. Even worse, I couldn’t see how it related to plant
breeding. It was a bandwagon in those days. Everybody had to know
something about cytogenetics. After seeing what we had at IRRI, I went
to Chandler and said, “Let’s dump the cytogeneticist and hire a second
breeder. And, if you are willing to do that, I recommend
Hank Beachell.”
So, Hank Beachell [left in photo with Bob Chandler]
came in as I was leaving for a year’s sabbatical. By then, the F3
lines had been planted out and they looked wonderful. They just
confirmed the F2s. These rows were pure dwarfs. They were not
segregating as one would expect on a recessive gene. They were
magnificent, extraordinary compared to the tall, traditional, leafy,
lodging plants. So, I figured it was in the bag. And then, Beachell went
in and selected plants from the F3 rows and that took him to
the F4 (by that time, I was back). Then, we just picked out
the best ones and multiplied seed like crazy. And that’s really the true
story of IR8.
Who gets the credit for IR8?
A lot of people afterwards tried to assume part of the credit for
what was done. But the story I just gave you is the true story. In the
area of achievement, the early things on
 crossing
and dormancy were good. I’m very proud of those two. But, far more
impressive in my mind was that first day when I saw that segregation. No
one could have expected that. It was unexpected. It was almost
serendipity. And this is where the wheat and the rice stories are
totally different—the Green Revolution based on those two grain crops.
In rice, I contend, no one knew that there was a single recessive gene
in the Taiwan materials. In wheat, it was very different. Japanese
breeders had been producing dwarf wheats for years. Dwarf wheats were
produced in America before
Norman Borlaug [photo right] got ahold of them and produced
semidwarf wheats for the more tropical areas. They knew that they had
dwarfing genes in wheat. Good varieties had been produced. In rice, no
one knew—that’s my interpretation. Now, years later,
Ronnie Co ffman
[former IRRI rice breeder, 1971-81, photo from his own Pioneer Interview
at left] says that the Chinese told him that they knew all about this,
prior to IR8. Well, maybe so. I just don’t believe it. S.H. Ou didn’t
know and he had been working in rice in China. The Chinese didn’t know
in Taiwan; T.T. Chang didn’t know. I suspect that if indeed the Chinese
had known and they had done it, they would have made a lot of noise
about it. I think it’s a combination of jingoism and revisionist
history. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? It was done; who cares
where? It just happened that it was done at IRRI and, of course, that
led to the Green Revolution and we all know the rest of the story.
It was total luck. The only programmed part of it
was we had this prior concept (in talking with Tanaka) of ideally what
would the plant look like, but that was a far cry from producing it and
producing it was just good fortune.
IR8’s problems. IR8 had tremendous problems,
milling quality above all. Its grain appearance was shabby and [its]
shape was terrible. In the Asian environment, after my time, IR8 came up
with disease and insect problems. We didn’t have that much of a problem
in Latin America with it. The problem we had there was more on the
milling side. But yes, we had problems. But that was the first step. In
Latin America, we started pumping out varieties very quickly to replace
IR8, which had made a huge impact in a great portion of Latin America
and it lasted, I don’t know, 4–5 years. And then it was replaced with
better-quality things. Sure, it was terrible, in that sense, but it had
this tremendous capacity to produce and that’s what sold it.
Impression of Bob Chandler, IRRI’s first
director general
 I'm
sure many of your interviewees will comment extensively about Chandler,
his mannerisms, the way he conducted his business. I will only add on
that subject that he was well named:
Robert "Flint" Chandler.
He was "flinty." He was a stereotypical New
England Yankee, very direct, hyper-enthusiastic. He maintained a
profound barrier between himself and his staff; he was nobody’s pal. But
with all of that, he was, by far, the best director of an institution
I’ve seen in 50 years. I think Bob left two legacies to IRRI. The first
was that he defined precisely what the objectives of the institution
were, and to Bob it was very clear, it was singular, [to give rice]
higher yield and better quality. We look back at that and it just seems
obvious to us now, but 50 years ago in Asia, [and] Latin America,
researchers didn’t talk in those terms. They would talk in the specifics
of whatever they were doing, but you never heard [them say] get
production up and improve the quality.
Higher yield and better quality. I think Bob
Chandler got that from George Harrar, who was then [as mentioned
earlier] director for agriculture at the Rockefeller Foundation. All of
the memos that passed between the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations
leading to consultations with Philippine authorities, leading to the
articles of the establishment of IRRI, these are the two objectives for
the Institute that are repeated in every document: higher yield and
better quality. Chandler, on every opportunity that I can recall—during
staff meetings, seminars, individual conversations, [with] every visitor
who came to IRRI, and during his travels to other countries—hammered
that theme and he wouldn’t let it go. He beat it to death. I think it
was impo rtant
because all of us—in the first group of researchers at IRRI—understood
from the very beginning what are our job was. Somehow, he brought all
the disparate disciplines together to focus on these two objectives.
I think it
was extremely important. I’ll give you an idea of what I’m leading to
because, by hammering on these objectives, it became absorbed into the
minds of everybody. I think he converted everybody. I had a long trip in
Asia in 1960 before I came to IRRI. I traveled with Sterling Wortman
(photo right) for something like 5 weeks. Wortman was then the assistant
director for IRRI who had just moved to the Philippines. The purpose of
the trip was for me to see something about rice in Asia and to find out
who the players were in the various institutions and to meet the people
who were involved in rice, and to possibly find potential new staff for
the forthcoming IRRI.
We actually found three, very brilliant ones: soil chemist
Felix Ponnamperuma (see
pages 28-29 at the end of this World Bank pdf file), the
excellent pathologist
S.H. Ou, and the geneticist
T.T. Chang. During the course of these travels, Sterling and I
had a lot of time together and, one day, I asked him, “When you were
working with pineapples in Hawaii, what was your objective?” He said,
“to produce a ‘round’ pineapple.” I looked skeptically at him. He said
he had to do that because the industry demanded that the pineapple be
perfectly cylindrical so that it would fit into a tin can. Alright, I
let it go.
Six years later, I knew it was time to leave IRRI. When I had first
arrived, I had identified [those] four problems [see above] that had to
be solved and I figured that by 1966 those problems had been essentially
resolved. I went to the United States to interview at some universities.
At Cornell, I was offered a plum job—full professor—with a much higher
salary. I said that I would get back to them in 10 days. On my way back
to Manila, I stopped in New York for a courtesy call at the Rockefeller
Foundation, nothing more. Sterling was there. He had left IRRI, returned
to Hawaii, and was then pulled out of there very quickly into New York
by Harrar, who [had since become] president of the Foundation (1961-72).
Sterling came to Rockefeller as director for agriculture. I went into
Sterling’s office and he asked me what I was going to do?
“Well, Sterling,” I said, “maybe I’ll go to Cornell.”
“Well, wait a minute,” he said, “what if you went back to
Colombia?”
I perked up!
“You can start an inter-American rice program,” he said.
Now this was 5 years before CIAT [International
Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Colombia] was created, so
I’d be all alone down there.
Then, he said something spectacular, “I will evaluate you on
your ability to increase national yields of rice.”
I looked at that man and I could have kissed him. Sterling
Wortman had progressed from breeding round pineapples to emphasizing
production and yield increases. Where did he get that from? It was
“drilled” into him by Bob Chandler. So that was one legacy of Bob
Chandler that I think was crucial.
Bob Chandler: IRRI’s first editor? The second
legacy that sticks in my mind is that Bob expected everyone at IRRI—be
they laborers, cooks, research assistants, secretaries, or senior
staff—to be the very best; [he demanded] excellence from each and every
staff member. If everyone were to do their jobs well, the probability of
the Institute being successful would be greater. He could not abide
sloppiness. It would drive him hysterical if he saw paper scraps
floating about some place. He wanted jobs done well to the best of one’s
capabilities. Again, I think that this ethic infused throughout the
entire institution and brought us all together. Our standards were set
high from the very beginning.
I’ll give you another example of what I’m talking about.
Again, it goes back to Sterling Wortman.
On that trip I took with him mentioned earlier, I asked him,
“What is it like working with Bob Chandler?”
He said, “Okay, but there was this one thing that is driving
me crazy.”
He said,
“Okay, but there was this one thing that is driving me crazy.”
Sterling was the assistant director at IRRI in Manila at the time. He
said that he could not write a letter on IRRI letterhead and send it to
anybody without Bob Chandler reviewing the letter first. Sterling
grumbled about this. He said that he’d get his letters back corrected
for syntax, spelling, and grammar. He was indeed frustrated. He didn’t
like this. What’s the point? I adored Sterling Wortman, but in those
days he was not a good writer. Within 5 or 6 years, he became a superb
writer. He wrote a very good book with Ralph W. Cummings, Jr. [son of
IRRI’s second direrector general] To Feed This World: the Challenge
and the Strategy [The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978]. He was able to do
this because Chandler had trained him. Chandler couldn’t abide having a
letter from IRRI with a grammatical error in it. I think others will
comment in different ways but for me those are the two legacies that he
instilled and left—I hope—at IRRI. Certainly, these are the ones that
impressed me.
Conversations during the
early days
 How
many were there of us? I think maybe 15 or 16 researchers [photo of
senior staff meeting, 18 November 1963; click to enlarge]. Among the
researchers, spread out among several disciplines, I particularly
enjoyed talking with four. S.H. Ou [plant pathologist, 1961-78; 7th from
left in group photo] was a real
 source
of wisdom, a lot of experience, excellent eyes. I talked to him about
pathology. This was not breeding exactly. But I was trying to learn as
much as I could and relate it to what I was trying to do. We got along
very well and conversed at length on many subjects.
Felix Ponnamperuma [soil chemist, 1961-85; 9th from left in
group photo and at right] was another. His subject was the esoteric,
complicated business of the chemistry of flooded soil. What’s that got
to do
 with
plant breeding? I don’t know, probably nothing. But he was smart and I
just liked to talk to Felix. I cannot put my finger on much that accrued
from those conversations into breeding, but I just know I liked to talk
to him, so I appreciated him very much.
Another person I thought very highly of who no one ever
hears about is Lloyd Johnson. He was the IRRI agricultural engineer
[1961-68; 3rd from left in group photo and at left] who developed the
experiment station—a real practical guy. He knew all about machinery and
it was just obvious that we had to be thinking about machinery if we
were going to do breeding. Every time we make a change in a plant, we
are going to have to make some sort of a change in the way the farmer
grows it. I have very high respect for these three.
Let me go back to Akira Tanaka [head of IRRI’s Plant
Physiology Department, 1962-66; 5th from left in group photo and at left
in photo at left with Jennings]. If I were to go to IRRI
 tomorrow
and give a seminar and ask the audience who can tell me about Akira
Tanaka, there would be very few who could even identify him. What was
his contribution? Well, he did this really excellent work on the
physiology of populations. But I don’t remember him for that. I remember
him for being a good friend and a conversationalist, a partner, just
talking back and forth. He had all this experience and his contribution
to [the development of] IR8 is equivalent, in my mind, to that of a
breeder. He helped to define the course, the way. If we do this, and
this, and this, something good might happen. Without Tanaka, I think, we
w ould
have struggled longer; I RRI
would have struggled longer. Tanaka is not remembered for this. I
remember Tanaka. He was a giant.
Among nonresearchers, I must mention Rebecca Pascual,
manager of food and dormitories [1961-94; far right photo]—excellent—and
Lina Manalo-[Vergara], librarian [1961-93; left in group photo and at
near right]—excellent.
Distributing IR8 in the
Philippines
Lyndon Baines Johnson, then president of the United States,
visited IRRI in October 1966. But I have to give the second part of this
story first. The year previous [1965], Beachell had done a ve ry
good job of cleanin g
up a line that was ultimately selected to be the variety IR8, producing
fairly uniform seed. I can’t remember how much, but that seed was given
to Federico Ramos, who was then the station superintendent at IRRI
[1961-85; 6th from left in group photo and at far left]. Federico
planted out a big area and I think he harvested about 50 tons of what
became IR8. The bulk of that went to, I’m not sure what it was called,
part of the Philippine Corn and Rice Bureau or something like that, I
presumed, for distribution. I insisted that Federico give me 5 tons and
Orlando Santos [the future farm superintendent and only person
at IRRI to have been on every annual staff list from 1962 to 2006—a span
of 44 years; near left], who was the assistant to Federico, packaged
that 5 tons into 2,500 2-kg bags.
They came on horses, in jeepneys. We wanted to
give this seed out to any farmers who would come by IRRI to pick it
up—no questions asked, no cost involved. Somehow, the word got out and
it was extraordinary. Within a week or 10 days, we exhausted the 2,500
bags. For awhile, I kept a record of the names of the farmers and what
pr ovinces
they came from. I don’t know if that list still exists, but they came
from all over the Philippines and how they heard about this, I’ll never
know. But they came on horses, they came in jeepneys, they walked in,
they bicycled in, they got there! We gave each a bag. Well, in
retrospect, that was a superb mechanism for disseminating, extending,
getting IR8 spread around the Philippines. It worked. Sometime in late
1965 or 1966 perhaps, the press got hold of the story about IR8 and it
became quite a thing. [The] Green Revolution! For awhile, IRRI was
inundated with visitors: prime ministers came; queens. Chandler would
announce that so and so is coming next week. “Shape it up! Wear a white
shirt and tie,” he would say.
Lyndon Johnson’s visit to IRRI, October 1966
Then we got the announcement that President Johnson was coming with
President Marcos and their respective wives. Alright, get your shirt out
and put the tie on. And indeed, the two presidents came. It was October
1966, and they came for the specific purpose of seeing the
 miracle
rice [see Miracle rice as produced by the press, by Gelia
Castillo], the Philippine jargon for IR8.
Well, this is just before lunch. Sometime around 11 o’clock
in the morning, they show up. Someone had the foresight [Urbito
Ongleo, IRRI photographer, 1961-89] to build a walking area into the field,
right in front of the circle, which was between the then administration
building [later Chandler Hall] and our laboratory building [later Hill
Hall]. There was a plot of IR8 right there. The size of the walkway
looked to me like an aircraft carrier. It was maybe 3 meters wide and
perhaps 5–6 meters long. This was so the great man would not fall into
the mud. So, we trooped out there—first, Chandler, President Marcos,
Beachell, myself, and, right behind me, Johnson. I was starting to walk
onto the levee when I heard this deep southern drawl. He said, “Boy!” I
know he was talking to me. I answered, “Sir.” And he repeats, “Boy, move
over to one side; the photographers want to take my picture.” When he
said “boy” the first time, I thought he might be asking me how to get
out of this mess in Vietnam or at least have a question about IR8. No,
he wanted his photograph taken. So, the “boy” moved over to one side.
[In the photo above are, from left, Peter Jennings (standing), Hank
Beachell (squatting), Robert Chandler, President Ferdinand Marcos, and
President Lyndon Johnson.]
That’s not the end of the Johnson story. Shortly before
lunch—Chandler had laid out a very fine luncheon for the diplomatic
corps, Johnson and his wife, President Marcos and his wife, and the
senior staff. Rebecca Pascual outdid herself. It was immaculate. The
tables were set up with flowers in vases and white tablecloths. It was
grand. So, we marched in there with the diplomats and the senior
scientists. And of course, we’re not going to sit down until the two
presidents came in. So, we’re standing. We all had our assigned seats.
There must have been 50 people in there. We’re standing and we’re
waiting. Ten minutes go by. People are getting edgy. What’s going on
here? Nothing!
I think 15 minutes passed. Chandler bursts in—typical
Chandler, always in a hurry! He was distraught. He said, “I regret to
announce that President Johnson
an d
President Marcos had to leave in a helicopter.” He added, “I didn’t know
that. But I invite you to sit down and enjoy your lunch and thank you
very much for coming to IRRI.”
A touch of class. Years later, I visited
Chandler and his wife, Sonny [together at IRRI in photo at left], at
their retirement home in Florida—maybe 10 years ago [1997]. We were
talking, reminiscing. I asked Sonny, “Do you remember that luncheon?
She said,
“Boy, do I remember that luncheon. You know, in the mail I got a lovely
note from Mrs. Johnson [photo at right] and that note, in effect,
stated, ‘Thank you very much for everything you did for us. We enjoyed
our visit. We regret that Lyndon had an emergency and that we had to
leave suddenly, but again thank you and sorry for if it caused you any
problems.’”
It was a note
of grace on the part of Mrs. Johnson. She showed some class. I’ll never
forget that day [in October 1966]. It was amazing.
No IRRI without the
Filipino staff
We wouldn’t have had an IRRI without the Filipino national staff
[current IRRI staff as of December 2007 in photo below is 87% Filipino],
would we? I can only speak for the ones that worked directly with us in
our Varietal Improvement Program. I rate them, on the basis of work in
many countries and working with lots and lots of young people, very
highly—competent.
IRRI stimulated governments to start putting money into agriculture
We have to go back now 40-odd years, don’t we? When IRRI
started, and I’m sure one of the reasons for starting IRRI was that, in
effect, there were no national programs in tropical Asia. Certainly,
there were a few isolated rice people working alone in an uncoordinated
way. But national programs—as I understand what that means today—did not
exist. I think that’s one of the unrecognized contributions of IRRI.
This sudden surge of productivity from IRRI stimulated governments to
start putting money into agriculture, which had not been going there in
the 1950s or the early 1960s. Somehow, the national programs developed,
but that was after my time at IRRI.
So, when I was there, I knew individual scientists and made
trips, but there wasn’t what I would consider today to be a national
program where we had research and it was all linked together by
discipline or related to some sort of extension. Extension, I guess,
didn’t exist as far as I could tell. Sure, there were good people—not
many—scattered around. They were not organized. That came after IR8,
after IRRI made its contribution.
Leaving IRRI for Latin
America
Of course, I started in Latin America before going to IRRI.
By 1966, I figured the four problems that I mentioned earlier—and I’m
sure these weren’t all of them—the ones that got my attention had been
resolved by and large. I just figured it was time for me to move on. I
had two reasons. One was, IRRI, to my way of thinking was something like
a university where a staff member, whatever the discipline, would go
down every day to the office and to the field to do his “thing.” And the
“thing” was within a discipline. It was a clearly defined job. I was a
plant breeder. I would be doing plant breeding every day—both in the lab
and in the field. Well, I had enough experience in Colombia. I was
infected with another philosophy. I was not interested to spend the rest
of my life making crosses and breeding. I wanted to work in the whole
environment of rice production activities: entomology, weeds, pathology,
seed production, developing extension services, and all sorts of things
like that. It was just a personal preference and I knew there was no way
I could do that at IRRI.
The second reason, I think, was very important in my mind.
When I worked in Colombia the first 4 years before going to IRRI, I got
to know a lot of farmers, a lot of rice farmers. I had to because when I
got to Colombia, I was told by the ministry to develop a rice program
where there was no rice program. There were no rice experiment stations.
There were no people working in rice. So, we had to start from scratch.
We had to build experiment stations. We had to hire people
(professionals, laborers, whatever). We had to get equipment and lay out
the fields—it wasn’t easy. I needed help for certain specific things
and, when you needed help in those days, you went to the farmers.
I
needed access to their farms. I had to put things on their farms because
I didn’t have the experiment stations. So, I got to know a lot of
farmers and I enjoyed that very much. At IRRI, I wasn’t going to meet
many farmers. They sure were not going to come to IRRI. Maybe it was a
language barrier, maybe it was difficulty flying around Asia, whatever.
I felt isolated from farmers. But I knew in Latin America I had
immediate access to farmers and I missed that terribly. So, I think for
those two reasons I left IRRI in 1966. I went back to Colombia with
great joy and pleasure and spent almost 35 years there.
The rice revolution in Latin America
Genetic versus agronomic advances. I can almost guarantee
you that this [the following] story is correct for Latin America. I
suspect, strongly, exactly the same story in Asia. And, in effect, the
story is: before leaving IRRI, I sent 100 kg of IR8 to the head of the
Rice Federation in Bogotá, Colombia. He planted those 100 kilos on his
farm.
A year or two
later, I asked him, “How did you make out?”
He said, “I
couldn’t believe it.”
I supposed
with 100 kilos that he planted half a hectare.
He said, “I
got 8 tons a hectare.”
I guess the
best yield he had ever got before that was maybe 4 tons. Well, he took
that harvest on a half a hectare—4 tons of seed—and he broke it up and
he distributed it among his buddies in the Rice Federation—people
affiliated with farmers in the Rice Federation. That is how IR8 got out
[in Colombia]. It went like wildfire.
I arrived there in 1967, one year later. I’ll never forget
it. I drove to this one area where the first impact was. On both sides
of the roads and in all the schoolyards and behind the churches, [I saw]
huge amounts of rice—stockpiled, tremendous piles of rice. The drying
and milling capacity was not geared to handle this sudden surge of
product. Of course, that problem solved itself within a year or two.
Then, IR8 quickly went out to many other Latin American countries,
mostly tropical, and had the same impact as it had in Colombia.
In Asia, Bob Chandler had estimated the contribution of IR8
on a hectare, on average, was about half a ton. Half a ton was not that
much, but on a percentage basis, it was enormous. If the average yield
in the tropics in Asia then was a ton and a half, another half ton is a
third more—that’s significant. In Latin America, it was substantially
more, about 2 tons, on average. Yields jumped all of a sudden for one
crop on any farm and then it took a year or two to spread o n
to all the farms—the conversion from traditional varieties to semidwarf
[varieties].
A one-semester shot. My contention is then it
stopped after the first harvest. Yields did not go up any higher [like
in Peru, photo at left]. We all got confused by this. We didn’t
understand that at all. No matter how many new varieties we produced,
something like 400 semidwarfs in Latin America, yields did not go up.
National averages hit that very high level and plateaued. What was going
on? I looked at data from Asia and I think I mentioned in the Rice
Today article [see
Rice revolutions in Latin America, Rice Today Vol. 6, No. 2],
in Asia, it’s a little bit different. Yields of half a ton were
immediate and then slowly, slowly, but progressively, increased. It got
up at some point to 3 1/2 to 4 tons. I don’t think that it was varietal
at all. It was management, particularly conversion from rainfed to
irrigated. What we were seeing was better irrigation. That’s slow—it
takes time to convert from one ecosystem to another. My point is the
variety is like a nova: it explodes—and then it’s dead! That was the
Green Revolution. It had an enormous contribution. Everyone talks as if
the Green Revolution is a long-term thing. I don’t think so. It was a
one-semester shot.
There was a yield gap. We had lots of varieties.
No matter what we did, yields did not improve. But finally (pretty slow
I guess), it dawned on us that it had nothing to do with varieties. The
variety made its impact. It still has enormous yielding capacity that
was not being expressed on the farms. That’s called the yield gap. There
are lots of ways to express yield gaps, but take any definition you
want. My God, in Latin America, the gap is huge. I think it is 3–4 tons
between what the farmer gets and what he could get with that same
variety if he managed [the crop] in a different way. Well, that leads us
to conclude that the problem was (originally, unquestionably) varietal
and we had a Green Revolution. It was a genetic revolution. Now,
we’re saying that ended and we go into an agronomic revolution.
There is a long story involved h ere,
except to say that the organization I worked with an agronomist,
Edward Pulver, a consultant to the
Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR), who approached
agronomy in a totally different way from the conventional way. He proved
that the limitations with the existing semidwarf varieties were
agronomic. If put together in a package, the solutions to some
problems—four, five, or six of them—all at once, you get a second
revolution. And we did. That second revolution is as great in magnitude
as the first. The second is agronomic.
Some dangerous water. Now this is not nonsense.
This is now proven on millions of hectares in five, six, or seven
countries. Yields jumped enormously without changing the variety. This
demonstrated (proved) that indeed there’s a lot of untapped yielding
capacity in varieties. Now, what does this all mean? It seems to me that
it leads us into some dangerous water here. We’re talking about where
we’ve gone wrong as a rice community for a long, long time. I have no
doubt that the Green Revolution resulted in enormous enthusiasm and
stimulated continuing work in the area of genetics—call it breeding,
call it genetics, call it biotech—on the plant side. We all know this is
true. It’s a huge investment.
If you look at the staffing pattern at IRRI, it would
reflect what CIAT has. [Both] have so many people working with the
genetics of the plant in one form or another and very few in agronomy. I
believe, in the last three decades, that the problem has been
misidentified. We’ve done all this work in breeding and breeders have
been frustrated. I’ve been on the road and talked to them. “We tried
this, we tried that,” they say. “We cannot get yields higher with these
new varieties we’re putting out.” They’re wonderful in quality, they’re
wonderful in resistance and adaptability and all of these, but yields
are not going up—with the exception of hybrids. So, we’ve missed that
part of the problem. We’ve poured all this money into looking for
greater yield capacity without understanding that the varieties have
been out there for a long time with unexploited yield capacity. And the
only way to exploit it is to improve the management of the crop on the
farms.
This is a story that’s true and pretty well accepted in
Latin America and is extending. Extension of agronomic-based technology
is very slow compared to the extension of seed-based technology.
Seed-based technology is fast. You put seed in a box; you send it to a
guy in another country; he takes it out and all of a sudden every farm’s
yield is up. Extension of agronomy is slow because it’s
farmer-to-farmer, extension agent-to-farmer, to the next farmer, to the
next. But, it is as powerful as the Green Revolution. This leads us to
ask: What is the future, where are we going now? If we had two
alternating revolutions, in my mind, I believe the next revolution will
revert to become varietal again, for the second time. The agronomic
revolution will close this yield gap; now we’re going to need greater
yielding capacity. How do we do this? The last 4–5 years of my life have
been focused on that problem. How do you get higher yielding capacity
without going the hybrid route? It’s possible now that we have a much
better understanding. I think it’s possible to make one more jump and
that, again, will be genetic. So, here is this fascinating sequence of
contributions of revolutions with one discipline and the next and
progress depends upon how well we’ve done the previous.
A precondition: breeders and agronomists must come
together. Unfortunately, breeders and agronomists do not work
together. They don’t talk to each other much. However, I think—and this
will infuriate some people—the Green Revolution in Latin America, for
sure, had very little input [contribution] from agronomy. Everything
stayed the same on the farm. Change the variety and intend to use more
nitrogen. That [nitrogen] was the one contribution from agronomy. The
agronomic revolution is 100 percent agronomic. There is no variety
component. They’re using the same old varieties that have been out for a
few years. The next revolution, if it indeed turns out to be genetic,
ideally will involve the collaboration of the two disciplines—because to
detect the higher yield capacity, you have to do it on farms; you cannot
do this on experiment stations. If you are going to do it on farms, it
has to be done under ideal management and that’s where agronomy and
breeding have got to come together. I’m not too hopeful. It will not be
easy
to accomplish, but it’s a precondition.
Comparing Latin America with Asia: apples and oranges.
We’re comparing apples and oranges here. In Asia, my understanding
is that the national programs are still quite good, strong. In Latin
America, they died almost without exception. The public sector, national
programs, ministries of agriculture or their subsidiaries have gone.
They’re no longer operative, okay? And there were many explanations why
this happened in Latin America. I’m sure there’s an explanation why they
are still strong and active in Asia. But what does that mean? Take CIAT.
The system for many years from the beginning of CIAT was: you do work at
CIAT, you link to the national program, which takes whatever you’re
selling, whatever the technology; they evaluate it and maybe improve it
somewhat for the farmers. CIAT never worked with farmers, except when I
could sneak out and not tell anybody. If there are no national programs,
CIAT has no client. Who is it working for? So, in the case of Latin
America, the system is not functioning. The CG centers are divorced from
their clients, the clients being the farmers, because there is no
intermediary to take this technology and extend it.
In Asia, I presume, it’s still the old system where IRRI
goes to the national program, which, in turn, hands out the technology
to the farmers. So where does IRRI stand? Well, in light of my
experiences, I don’t know because I haven’t been there for so long. So,
I can tell you what’s happening in Latin America and that gives the
emphasis, in our case, of privately financed research, user-financed
research, as opposed to public-financed research. New organizations are
popping up, financed by the users, the farmers, through various
check-off systems. It’s appealing to me for at least one reason, and it
is simply that the person, who is putting the money up, determines what
the work will be, okay? He goes to the scientist and says I’m going to
give you money in this institution, financed by farmers, growers’
associations, and you’ll do this and this and this with my money, okay?
Fair enough.
Of course, CIAT today, I ask: what [is it] doing? They’re
doing this and that. Why are they doing that? Well, they got a million
dollars from a German bank or something, Swiss, or God knows where—maybe
it’s got nothing to do with what the farmers are asking for. The
decision of what a CIAT is doing—if it is not related to the farmer, I
don’t understand it. CIAT is not working for the farmer because it is
working on a grant or whatever you call these moneys that come from
projects on things of interest to the donors. Farmers are not involved.
That’s why I like this new emerging model. I don’t know if it is going
to work or not, but this is not applicable, as I understand it, to the
IRRI-Asia model—I don’t know. It’s a different game. Now, I know what
I’ve said is going to upset people at CIAT. They are going to be
offended by what I’ve said. I am not out to offend anybody, particularly
my very valued colleague, [IRRI director general] Bob Zeigler. I do
believe in what I’m saying but it’s simply one man’s opinion.
 Challenges
for IRRI
Let’s preface this that I have not been back to IRRI for
probably 25 years. I’m out of touch clearly with the Asian situation.
What I can speak about with some confidence is what I learned and what
I’ve seen in Latin America, an entirely different environment. But let’s
go back to agronomy for a minute. A good question is: Why wasn’t this
done before in agronomy? None of the solutions to the identified
problems—there are six problems in common over most farms in Latin
America [weeds, fertilization, planting methods, plant density, land
leveling, and water control]—are new to science. They are well worked
out. It’s just putting them together. Why wasn’t this done before? Why
do we wait 30-odd years, concerned about this barrier to productivity on
farms? Obviously, there have been many good agronomists. And I have
known many. And that is as equally true, I’m convinced, in Asia as it is
in the Americas.
I think the answer might be that agronomists tend to become
specialists. They are experts on weed control, on fertilization, on
planting methods, on [plant] densities, on machinery, on leveling of
land, and on water control. They’re all good, but they’re specialists.
What if a farmer comes in and says, “My yields are not very good; can
you help me?” A specialist would go to the farmer, let’s say a wizard on
weed control, and that farmer is going to have weed problems. I know it.
And he shows the farmer how to control his weeds, and he does. But his
yields are not going to go up because the other four or five problems
are negating the impact of that one. You solve one but you have left
four or five other problems. The yields are not going to respond. If
there are four or five problems, you’ve got to solve four or five
problems simultaneously. And there’s a lot of evidence that this is
true. If you solve all of them, the yield goes up superbly; if you solve
four, it goes up very well; three, less; two; and so on. But agronomists
don’t tend to work on this broad conceptualization of looking at the
entire farm. They are looking at their area in which they are very good,
but they’re missing the rest. I suspect that’s the answer. Why it hasn’t
been done in an integrated fashion grieves me.
Now the question is: Is what I’m talking about applicable to
Asia? Is the relative lack of progress and productivity in Asia in part
(a large part?) due to inappropriate management? Or are the people w ho
have been investing in varieties, in genetics, in biotech, are they
right in that it’s been a varietal problem? I think it is agronomy. I
see no reason to suggest that what is true on one continent is not going
to be true on another.
Varieties versus agronomy. And now we’re
trying to address the question of what might IRRI do in the
future—understanding that this is a Latin American talking, not someone
from Asia and so there’s a bit of speculation here. So, I’ve read
carefully the latest IRRI statements in its Strategic Plan (Bringing
Hope, Improving Lives: Strategic Plan, 2007-2015) and two
things jumped out at me. I think IRRI is going off in the wrong tangent
in these two examples.
One is, reading between the lines, there is still a very
heavy investment in the genetics side of farm improvement—varieties. If
you lump them together, everybody is in biotech, breeding, genetics, and
so on. Put them all in one package and there’s very, very little
comparable attention to agronomy. I think that it’s out of balance. If
indeed the constraint on farms today in Asia, as in the Americas, is
largely because the management is not appropriate, it is clear that the
focus [should be] on the agronomy. The next big jump is going to be
agronomy. If everything I’m saying is true, that leads to another
problem. How do you do agronomy? Where do you do agronomy? I’d never
known, in 50 years maybe, of the real impact coming from some sort of
agronomic research that was experimented and evaluated and proven at an
experiment station. I just don’t believe it. I think it’s got to be done
on farms under the real conditions where the farmers are doing the
planting, incorporating whatever suggestions the specialist is telling
them to do.
A lot of reasons for that: it makes extension so much
easier; it convinces a farmer if it is on his farm. An experiment
station represents nothing other than that one experiment station. Now,
agronomists are not frequently keen to do essentially all of their work
on farms. They generally like the protection of experiment stations. And
if you do that, I think you’re doomed. So this transition is not going
to be easy. So, that’s one area in which I think IRRI ought to take
leadership.
National programs tend to be very strong in Asia compared
with Latin America, where they are essentially defunct. There are good
agronomists. But again, they’re going to be specialists, very good in
one thing or the other. And to organize all of that resource base into a
new approach—doing it on farms and doing it all packaged together in
demonstration plots. We [in Latin America] just don’t believe much in
replicated plots. Everything is on-farm and everything is big. A plot to
us is on a farm, 5 or 10 hectares, no reps, but it is replicated over
many farms. I think there’s a terrible imbalance between crop management
and genetics. It’s way out of whack and has been for 30 years. We got
seduced by how easy it was to produce IR8 or semidwarf wheat. And we
concluded that if we just do a little more, we’ll do better. It didn’t
work. We did a lot more and didn’t get better.
Irrigated versus rainfed. The second area my
IRRI colleagues are not going to like at all. I think, from my time
which is 40 years ago compared to today in tropical Asia, that there’s
been a substantial shift from a predominant rainfed culture, which has
decreased in importance while the irrigated sector has increased in
importance, increased in area. I suspect that’s true, but I’d sure like
to see some numbers.
The new IRRI document (Bringing
Hope, Improving Lives: Strategic Plan, 2007-2015) has a very
clear emphasis on rainfed rice. I am not a believer in rainfed nor was I
much of a believer in upland in our situation in the Americas. If you’re
going to put your resources on improving upland, you’re making the
assumption that there isn’t much progress to be realized with irrigated.
It implies that we have gotten most of what’s possible with our
irrigated technology, and we don’t see going much further.
But if you’re going to try to approach that rainfed complex,
you’re dealing with some intractable problems. You’re dealing with
irregular, erratic water; it rains; it doesn’t rain; submergence;
drought; you’re dealing with inevitably a series of mineral and
nutrition interactions between the soil and the lack of water. There are
all kinds of deficiencies coming up; these are hard. Why do you do that
[work on rainfed rice]? The great God-given benefit of rice is that it
does well with its feet in the water. If you take the water away, you’ve
just got another cereal. Call it sorghum, call it maize, whatever. Why
try and convert and take away the great gift of rice in what it does so
splendidly if it has water setting on it, and turn it into something
else? In evolutionary terms, it just never went through that process.
In short, I don’t think you can do much. If you put all your
resources on this declining rainfed, and it’s going to be very, very
difficult; I don’t think you’ll have much to show for it. I do think,
and I’ll take the opposite position just for the sake of argument, you
have not extracted from the irrigated sector all the good that’s in
there. You’ve got a portion of it in IR8 and subsequent varieties,
obviously. These helped enormously in that respect. But you’ve got a
yield gap in irrigated and I just wouldn’t believe if someone tries to
argue that there isn’t much of a yield gap. I think it’s there. I think
it’s big. So that means to me, I would invest in irrigated. And I’d try
to figure out what is this yield gap due to? Who knows? I think the
future is in irrigated although water is declining. I don’t think you
can keep people on the farm with low-yielding, rainfed, upland,
marginalized ecologies that have little productivity. I don’t think it’s
sustainable. Irrigated rice is sustainable if it is well done and it is
much more efficient in terms of water. So, if I were [leading] IRRI, I’d
take the leadership in this area. I’d go back and focus on irrigated,
particularly in the dry season, when water is short. I’d figure out ways
to capture water. Yields are always much higher in the dry season than
in the rainy season.
I’d certainly emphasize agronomy management of the crop.
I occasionally watch the news on American television and I see short
clips of farmers in China, women particularly, out there with a bag of
fertilizer wading through a rice paddy. There’s water on the field.
They’re taking urea and throwing it into the water. That’s the dinosaur
age; you don’t do that; you lose the urea when you throw it into the
water. Examples like that; the nitrogen efficiency must be terrible. And
as you convert, which I think is probably inevitable in Asia, from
transplanting to direct seeding—I think that has to come, in any
ecology, irrigated or even rainfed—you’re going to run into new
problems. That’s just built into these two planting systems. For
example, there is the absolute requirement for tolerance of grain
breakage from the delayed harvest if you direct-seed, which is not
needed if you transplant.
So, I would suggest that, yes, we need IRRI. IRRI is
uniquely positioned to show leadership. If IRRI settles back and becomes
just another good research institution among many in Asia, I don’t see
much need for IRRI. Leadership—IRRI has to lead the way as it did many
years ago. And I think it can in the future. And where is IRRI going to
lead this crop, this commodity, exactly what can we do to make it more
productive? Those would be my two ideas.
I wouldn't have changed
much
It was so long ago, and you know that you are always going to
make mistakes. It’s inevitable. Chiefly, in plant breeding, if you’re
good, my guess is that for every 1,000 crosses you make, you might
develop a variety. That means you failed 999 times out of 1,000. Sure,
you make mistakes all the time, but big issues, I don’t know. It just
seems that whatever we did, it worked. I judge it on that basis, knowing
we screwed up inevitably in many ways. On balance, I
 think
it was okay. I wouldn’t have changed much.
Luck is the residue of
design
When I was a little boy, I was a fan of an American baseball
team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Their famous general manager was
Branch Rickey. This wizard said, “Luck is the residue of
design.” I think he was right. Some people are lucky, some people are
not lucky. Luck does appear on its own volition, I know, from time to
time. But luck is a consequence of putting a lot of mental observational
evidence altogether and all of a sudden it happens, it works. There is
always luck. But sometimes you earn your luck. You influence your luck
for sure.
I wish I was 26
years old again.
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