Imagine having to harvest more food in the next 40 years than humanity has harvested during the previous 10,000 years.

Sharpen your knife and fork because that is not just an intellectual phantasm. It is the reality confronting humanity, according to Purdue University researchers. If that isn’t daunting enough on its face, consider accomplishing this herculean task amidst the onslaught of climate change, water shortages, heat waves and the diminishment of arable land.

We have been here before (kind of). At the conclusion of World War II some 30 percent of the world’s population was chronically malnourished. The effort to ameliorate that problem, spearheaded by dollars from The Rockefeller Foundation, resulted in critical innovations from the mind of a young plant physiologist at DuPont named Norman Borlaug. To this day, Borlaug is credited with triggering farming’s Green Revolution, for which he won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug led a massive wheat-breeding