🌾The Greats

Instead of selling his best rams, Bakewell rented them out by the season — an innovation that let him track offspring quality across many flocks while keeping his genetics under control through the Dishley Society he founded in 1783. The scheme made his animals famous and his farm rich: by 1789 his ram lettings reportedly earned some 1,200 guineas in a single season, at a time when a farm laborer earned perhaps 20 pounds a year. Breeders travelled from across Europe to see how he did it.

In January 1921, Carver was granted ten minutes before the US House Ways and Means Committee to explain why the peanut industry deserved tariff protection. Demonstrating food after food made from peanuts, he so absorbed the initially dismissive committee that the chairman told him to take all the time he wanted; he spoke for well over an hour and left to applause. Just as characteristic was his Jesup wagon — a horse-drawn mobile classroom he designed in 1906 to carry demonstrations directly to sharecroppers who could never attend college.

Farming a dry ranch made Strong an engineer: her 1887 patent proposed a sequence of dams built one above another so each reservoir braced the next, storing floodwater for irrigation, and a second patent followed in 1894. The designs won two awards at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and in 1918 she testified before Congress advocating dams on the Colorado River for irrigation and flood control — over a decade before construction of what became Hoover Dam began.

Potter bought Hill Top Farm in 1905 with the earnings from her books and learned the fell-farming trade from her shepherds, showing Herdwick ewes under her married name and taking prizes at Lake District agricultural shows through the 1930s. In 1943 she was elected president-designate of the Herdwick Sheepbreeders' Association — the first woman chosen — but died before taking office. Her will left 14 farms and over 4,000 acres to the National Trust, on the condition that Herdwick flocks stay on the fell farms; they graze there still.

Borlaug doubled his breeding speed with shuttle breeding — raising two generations a year by hauling seed between Sonora's winter fields and the high Toluca valley — against his supervisors' explicit advice that it could not work. On the October 1970 morning the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, he was already out in a wheat field near Toluca; when his wife drove out to tell him, he reportedly replied that someone was pulling her leg and carried on working the plots for the rest of the day.

Fukuoka's signature technique was the clay seed ball — seed mixed into clay pellets and scattered on unploughed ground, protecting it from birds and drought until rain releases it. He demonstrated rice yields comparable to his conventional neighbors' without ploughing or keeping paddies flooded all season, and in later decades carried seed balls to re-vegetation projects in India, Greece and Africa. The Philippines' Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called Asia's Nobel, recognized his work in 1988.

Hybrid rice was impossible without a male-sterile parent plant, and for years none could be found — until 1970, when Yuan's assistant Li Bihu spotted a single wild male-sterile rice plant, later nicknamed 'Wild Abortive,' near a pond on Hainan island. That one plant became the genetic key to virtually all early hybrid rice. When Yuan died in May 2021, crowds lined the streets of Changsha as his cortege passed, and mourners left bundles of fresh rice stalks at the funeral home in tribute.