Born to a poor farmhouse in Iowa in 1914, Norman Vologue suffered the Great Depression as a child.

Born to a poor farmhouse in Iowa in 1914, Norman Vologue suffered the Great Depression as a child.

His family also experienced the fear of starvation.

I grew up watching neighboring farmers go bankrupt and children drop out of school due to malnutrition.

He realized.

That hunger is not just an inconvenience but a violence that destroys human dignity.

His major in plant pathology at the University of Minnesota was no coincidence.

He remembered this later.

“I wanted to make sure that no one else would suffer the pain I saw.”

In 1944, the young botanist Volog headed to Mexico.

At the time, Mexico relied on imports of wheat, and farmers were losing more than half of their harvest due to a bear disease called rust.

He worked 16 hours a day in the wheat field and crossed thousands of varieties of wheat.

When other scientists were working in the lab, he got down on his knees and touched the dirt.

“You can’t save a hungry person at the desk.”

It was a lesson I learned as a child on an Iowa farm.

The earth does not lie, and the real answer is that it is in the field.

Vologue’s persistent efforts paid off step by step.

In the early 1950s, he developed a series of rust-resistant wheat varieties.

Thanks to this, Mexico was able to achieve wheat self-sufficiency in 1956.

But Vologue didn’t stop here.

I was looking for a fundamental solution to dramatically increase the yield.

A key breakthrough came in 1953.

It was a meeting with Japan’s 10th conventional wheat farming industry.

Although this breed was short, it did not collapse even if it was given a lot of fertilizer.

Volog crossed this dwarf gene with the rust-resistant wheat he developed.

After over 6,000 crossbreeding experiments, in 1962 he completed the dwarf wheat cultivars Pytic 62 and Penhamo 62.

It is resistant to rust and yields are twice as high.

The stem was short, so it did not collapse in the wind, and more nutrients went to the grain.

In 1963, 95% of Mexican wheat was grown as an anti-dwarf variety developed by Vologue.

That year, yields increased sixfold compared to 1944, and Mexico became an exporter of wheat.

In 1964, additional high-yielding varieties such as Lermaroho 64 and Sonora 64 were released, and success continued.

But Vologue’s eyes were already facing elsewhere.

In the 1960s, India and Pakistan were on the verge of a major famine.

Experts predicted millions of people would starve to death.

Vologue sent 35 trucks carrying his dwarf wheat seeds to India.

But the real wall was high.

Indian government bureaucracy, war with Pakistan, farmers who don’t believe in seeds. Vologue jumped directly into the scene.

Sleeping with the peasants, learning their language, kneeling and sowing the seeds together.

One day, he drove a truck carrying wheat seeds across the border amid a gunfight at the India-Pakistan border.

People called him crazy, but he said this.

“Hunger kills more people than war.”

The result was phenomenal.

Wheat production in Pakistan increased from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.3 million tons in 1970.

India has become an exporter of wheat from the country it used to import.

The anticipated famine did not occur.

This was the Green Revolution.

In October 1970, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his contributions to mankind in the war against hunger.

It was unusual for an agronomist to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Volog spoke briefly at the ceremony.

“Only those who are full can speak of peace.”

He donated all of his prize money to the Green Revolution research and went back to the wheat field the day after the ceremony.

In his later years, he headed to Africa.

Even when he was over 90 years old, he taught farmers by walking through Ethiopia’s wheat fields.

He did not stop fighting hunger until he died in 2009 at the age of 95.

Norman Vologue’s legacy, from the billion lives he saved and the children they gave birth to, is hard to measure with figures.

The reason why someone living today exists at this moment may be because of a scientist who knelt down in a Mexican field 60 years ago.