#greenrevolution — Public Fediverse posts

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

updates on my WIP industrial ag mega-zine:

i've made good progress on the green revolution materials. i completed a spread about how the US began linking food aid to india to increased fertilizer use targets in 1965, and how they conditioned the release of food aid to india agreeing to allow foreign-owned fertilizer plants in their country (a really important story that i wanted to get right).

i also finished a spread featuring the triumphal story of the beginning of the green rev. and another spread about the creation of the green revolution myth and the importance of "The Image" to the green revolution and other stories of agricultural modernization. the stuff about "The Image" is central to the whole project and i hope that the spread is appealing enough visually to encourage people to read it, because it's kind of a complicated subject.

i haven't decided yet whether i want to do a whole spread that sort of goes through "myth vs more complicated reality" of every part of the green revolution legend (was there famine in india? was indian agriculture 'hopelessly mired in the past'? did the new seeds solve famine? was the green revolution foisted on developing countries? etc.). ideally that would be included, because the completed pages only hint at the fact that the legend wasn't the whole story. but i will go back and do that later because i want to move on. i've spent so much time just trying to understand the story of the green rev, going through loads of source materials, and picking out the texts and images i wanted to use. i want to move to something else.

the next topic is RICE. rice and wheat were the two main green revolution crops, and the development of the green revolution varieties of rice and wheat are both fascinating. i don't know if i'll do a whole spread about wheat, but i definitely want to do a spread about rice because there's crazy stuff about the philippines and marcos, and crazy stuff about the US promoting the green revolution rice variety in vietnam during the vietnam war. which is so crazy to me...it's really doing a number on my head... on the one hand, it's a classic example of western liberalism: "we bomb you with one hand, and offer 'help' with the other." on the other hand, i'm sure that the scientists and other agricultural workers who were trying to help vietnamese villagers grow better rice in the middle of a warzone thought they were doing something good and helpful (and maybe they were...i don't know...).... a lot of the stories i've read so far are like "look at these brave people trying to do agricultural outreach during a war!" and in my mind i'm going "yea, it's YOUR country that's doing the war too, so wtf." oh, and eventually the viet cong got a hold of the new rice variety and grew plenty of it and it supported their efforts, so yea, it was a huge mess.

finally, i don't know if this will make it into the magazine, but i just read a story from the jan. 9, 1967 issue of "foreign agriculture" about malaysia's agricultural efforts. they wanted to diversify their crops, get some higher yielding varieties of rubber, and they also wanted to get in on the new varieties of rice. but their people didn't like the new varieties of rice, so the government wanted to encourage doing 2 plantings a year of the new variety, export that, and use the money to import the rice varieties that their people liked (which presumably, was already growing in malaysia). so there ya have it - that's economic progress and efficiency apparently...

here's the issue if you want to read it yourself: https://archive.org/details/CAT10252662185/page/6/mode/2up

the malaysia topic also starts to get at something that i think is super important but that i'm not sure will make it into the final magazine: the fact that agricultural "modernization" or the green revolution or the industrialization of agriculture did not happen the same way in any two countries, and didn't even happen the same way across different regions of a large country like india. every country's history was different...different ways that land was distributed...different kinds of crops that lent themselves to different kinds of processes...a lot of the tropical crops didn't have as much research done on them as the crops of colder places because the colder places had more $ to invest in agricultural research on crops that were of economic importance in their countries... post-colonial land reforms had varying degrees of success...large-scale irrigation and road networks varied... the attitudes of every country's government varied toward agricultural "modernization" at different times in each country's history... and of course there was a huge split between the communist sphere and the western sphere - china and russia took totally different paths toward agricultural "modernization" than the countries that the US was trying to influence, like mexico and india.

#agriculture #AgriculturalHistory #rice #food #history #research #WIP #GreenRevolution #india

“It’s the bell curve again”*…

Joseph Howlett on how the central limit theorem, which started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers, became something on which scientists rely every day…

No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.

Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.

Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?

The answer boils down to the central limit theorem, a mathematical truth so powerful that it often strikes newcomers as impossible, like a magic trick of nature. “The central limit theorem is pretty amazing because it is so unintuitive and surprising,” said Daniela Witten, a biostatistician at the University of Washington. Through it, the most random, unimaginable chaos can lead to striking predictability.

It’s now a pillar on which much of modern empirical science rests. Almost every time a scientist uses measurements to infer something about the world, the central limit theorem is buried somewhere in the methods. Without it, it would be hard for science to say anything, with any confidence, about anything.

“I don’t think the field of statistics would exist without the central limit theorem,” said Larry Wasserman, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s everything.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the push to find regularity in randomness came from the study of gambling…

Read on for the fascinating story of: “The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.

Howlett concludes by observing that “The central limit theorem is a pillar of modern science, ultimately, because it’s a pillar of the world around us. When we combine lots of independent measurements, we get clusters. And if we’re clever enough, we can use those clusters to find out something interesting about the processes that made them”– which follows from the story he shares.

Still, we’d do well to remember that there are limits to its applicability, both descriptively (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, “because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty”) and prescriptively (as Benjamim Bloom argues, “The bell-shaped curve is not sacred. It describes the outcome of a random process. Since education is a purposeful activity….the achievement distribution should be very different from the normal curve if our instruction is effective).

For (much) more, see Peter Bernstein‘s wonderful Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

* Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

###

As we noodle on the normal distribution, we might send curve-shattering birthday greetings to Norman Borlaug; he was born on ths date in 1914. An agronomist, he developed and led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the voluminous increases in agricultural production we call “the Green Revolution.” Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal; he’s one of only seven people to have received all three of those awards.

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