1945 - Agriculture

Agriculture

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations establishes headquarters at Rome, with Scottish biologist John Boyd Orr, 65, as director. He issues gloomy prognostications on the world food situation.

U.S. Department of Agriculture agronomist Samuel C. Salmon, 60, discovers the semidwarf wheat variety Norin 10, whose two-foot stems respond quickly to water and fertilizer and do not fall over (lodge) from the weight of their grain heads. Salmon is a cereal improvement expert helping Japanese reconstruction as a member of Gen. MacArthur's occupation force. He finds Norin 10 on a visit to the Morioka experimental station in northern Honshu and returns home with some seeds that he grows in quarantine; Norin 10 proves to be extremely susceptible to leaf stripe and powdery mildew, but Salmon's colleague Orville Vogel crosses the Japanese wheat with resistant strains of U.S. wheat. Grains developed from Norin 10 will increase wheat harvests in India and Pakistan by more than 60 percent.

The U.S. soybean crop reaches 193 million bushels, up from 78 million in 1940.

The chemical 2, 4-D (2,4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) patented as a general weed killer by American Chemical Paint Co. was developed as a war weapon and patented by E. I. du Pont as a plant-growth regulator in 1943; the first selective plant killer, it will be found to destroy broad-leafed plants such as bull thistle, cocklebur, ragweed, and wild mustard while leaving food crops such as corn and wheat unharmed, thus increasing crop yields by destroying moisture- and nutrient-consuming weeds without laborious cultivation.

The chlorinated insecticides chlordane and methoxychlor are introduced to help farmers fight bugs that may be resistant to DDT (see 1943; 1948).

The University strawberry developed by the University of California agriculture station will make strawberries a long-season widely-grown commodity.