1941 - Agriculture

Agriculture

Mexico's wheat harvest falls by half as stem rust devastates crops in the nation's breadbasket—Queretaro, Guanajuato, Michoacan, and Jalisco. Mexico is obliged to spend $30 million (100 million pesos) each year to import corn and wheat, leaving less for desperately needed power generators, machinery, and chemicals from abroad.

The Rockefeller Foundation begins a program to improve Mexican agriculture at the urging of Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. It sends University of Minnesota rust specialist Elvin C. Stakman, 56, Cornell soil expert Richard Bradford, 46, and Harvard plant geneticist Paul C. Mangelsdorf, now 42, to Mexico, and they submit a blueprint for redeveloping the country's rural economy. Mangelsdorf has worked with Donald F. Jones to develop a method of genetically transmitting pollen sterility without the costly and tedious fieldwork of detasseling.