The Green Revolution

Like most revolutions, the famous, or infamous, Green Revolution of the late 1960s and 70s was a long time coming to the boil. Its success was only partly due to advances in rice breeding, but without genetics it would not have taken place and it was inevitably the ‘miracle rice’ that snatched the glamour and the headlines. Farmers and gardeners have been improving their stock by selecting the best plants for next year’s seed for thousands of years, but until quite recently they depended on chance mutations or cross-breedings that they did not understand and could not direct.