To feed the world

1 He was wandering in a rice field of dreams. The plants were taller than a man. Their ears hung full as brooms, and each grain was as big as a peanut. After walking a while he lay down in the leaf-shade, quite hidden. A rest was a good idea, because the wonder-plants went on and on. 

2 Then Yuan Longping woke up, laughing. The rice plants, which he had tended for decades in Anjiang and then Changsha in Hunan Province, sowing and nurturing them, visiting daily on his motorbike to inspect them, were not quite there yet. But they still deserved their name of super rice. The leaves were straighter and taller than ordinary ones, and the grains plumper. They had all the vigor of the wild strain that he and his team had found in Hainan in 1970 and had crossbred with the domesticated variety. Some skeptical people told him he was wasting his time, since rice was a self-pollinator. He believed that crossbreeding was universal and that it always made the offspring stronger. 

3 The figures spoke for themselves. With his new hybrid rice the annual yield was 20% higher. This meant that at least 70 million more people could be fed every year. China's rice yield had risen from 57 million tons in 1950 to 208 million in 2022, transforming China from food deficiency to food security. Higher rice yields allowed farmers to turn more land to other uses – fruit, vegetables, fishponds – so that people not only had more to eat, but ate well. And this message was for China as well as the world. He traveled across Asia and to Africa and America to help people grow rice, as well as inviting his foreign peers to China to share his research. A fifth of all rice grown globally now comes from hybrids that were his. 

4 For this Yuan Longping won the Medal of the Republic, China's highest state honor, and the World Food Prize. He was widely known as the Father of Hybrid Rice, and even an asteroid was named after him. Although he was famous, he chose to stay away from the spotlight and devoted himself to rice growing. His face was leathered by the sun and his big hands were rough from "playing in the mud" all day. He was far happier in his short-sleeved work shirts, out in his rice field, than in a suit in some conference hall. As an official of the World Food Prize Foundation said, Professor Yuan was incredibly humble. He never sought fame or adulation, but rather focused only on hard work and results that could help eradicated poverty and lift people out of hunger. 

5 Yuan Longping was born in Beijing, but he enjoyed the countryside and the thought of growing tasty things. Inspired by his initial interest, he decided to study agriculture in college. After graduation, Yuan Longping took a job as a teacher in Anjiang Agricultural School. He said, "Having enough food was people's priority." 

6 Yuan Longping had at first worked on grafting. He grafted moonflowers on sweet potatoes, tomatoes on potatoes, and a watermelon on a pumpkin, but found that any inherited traits vanished in the second generation. Then he read about plant genetics, and turned his full attention to China's staple, rice. 

7 As a boy he was fascinated by the deliciousness of Xiaozhan Rice from Tianjin, said to be the best in China at that time. Around Anjiang, what the farmers wanted was quantity: miracle-yields from their fields. They would cross the mountains to get better seeds, so he did the same, traveling around China to find the strong wild male-sterile plants he needed. Once he found them, it took three years to perfect the hybridizing and another three to get his super rice into commercial production. Then, in a steep curve, yields soared away. 

8 He kept on working to make rice better: salt-tolerant to grow by the coast, crossbred with corn to be more nutritious, enriched with vitamin A to improve people's eyesight. His mind was filled with the thought that if just half of the rice fields in the world were planted with his hybrid rice, an increase in yield of two tons per hectare would feed 400-500 million more people every year. And he still talked of plants taller than a man. 

9 Outside the funeral home in Changsha on the day after his death, crowds came to lay a mountain of yellow and white chrysanthemums. Several of the mourners said that whenever they sat down to a meal, or merely smelled the fragrance of rice, they would remember "Grandfather Yuan". Among the flowers were the traditional bowls of boiled rice, the best thing to commemorate the Father of Hybrid Rice.