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THE GREEN REVOLUTION
J.R. McNeill
Mechanization dovetailed with the Green Revolution, was a crucial departure in agriculture that depended centrally on plant breeding. The Green Revolution was a technical and managerial package exported from the First World to the Third, beginning in the 1940s but making its major impact in the 1960s and 1970s. It featured new high-yielding strains of staple crops, mainly wheat, maize and rice. Plant geneticists selected these strains for their responsiveness to chemical fertilizer and irrigation water, for their resistance to pests, and eventually for their compatibility with mechanized harvesting. Success required new inputs, new management regimes, and often new machines. The great triumph came with dwarf ...
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