“On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg” is an ongoing series documenting Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg’s ground-truthing work. Read more by clicking here.
I talk about the Green Revolution a lot in my work, but I had never been to the place where so much of it began until early this August. I visited Texcoco, Mexico, where the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Mexican Agricultural Program eventually led to CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
CIMMYT is dedicated to building food security, resilient agriculture, and scientific collaboration across the Global South. And its history is complex and complicated.
It was here that Norman Borlaug and his colleagues researched and promoted high-yielding cereal varieties and the use of artificial fertilizers to increase food production. The Green Revolution helped avert famine in Mexico, India, and elsewhere. But we also know that these practices often displaced traditional, biodiverse, locally rooted systems of cultivation and increased farmers’ dependence on expensive inputs.
What struck me during my time with CIMMYT is how much the organization is trying to learn from that history.
Today, CIMMYT talks about a green evolution, instead of a revolution—one that is less about delivering a package of technologies to farmers and more about co-creating and sharing knowledge with them.
There is “no universal recipe” for sustainable and resilient food systems, says Jelle Van Loon. What works for a farmer in one community may not work for a farmer somewhere else. The science has to meet farmers where they are, Van Loon adds.
In addition to investing in breeding programs for new varieties of wheat, maize, and other crops, CIMMYT is also recognizing that farmers are safeguarding biodiversity on their farms every day. And they are holding the future of food on their shoulders.
I’ll give you an example. In Oaxaca, I got to see the milpa system in action.
Milpa is often described as the three sisters—maize, beans, and squash grown together so they strengthen one another and the soil. Farmers growing food this way can have as many as 27 different crops on just a few hectares, without pesticides and with very little or no artificial fertilizer. Sunflowers attract beneficial insects and give farmers extra income. Cowpeas and other legumes help farmers cope with drought.
This isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake. It’s resilience.
Oaxaca’s farmers are dealing with increasingly difficult drought conditions. One farmer-technician told me that when those challenges become overwhelming, “families start losing hope.”
But diversified farming systems like milpa give farmers more ways to survive a bad season. If one crop fails, another may succeed. They can provide food, animal feed, healthier soils, protection from pests, and income—all while allowing farmers to maintain cultural traditions and identities that have existed for generations.
And farmers using milpa are usually growing native maize varieties. Mexico is the birthplace of maize and home to extraordinary genetic diversity. CIMMYT’s gene bank houses the world’s largest collection of maize germplasm—and that seed bank is very cool, no pun intended. It’s kept at -15°C (5°F) and holds hundreds and hundreds of varieties of wheat and maize. The corn seeds are like small jewels—purple, blue, red, black, yellow, white. That seed bank, like thousands of others around the world, is protecting the future of humanity.
While not as fancy, the small seed banks I saw in farmers’ houses in Oaxaca are just as—if not more—important. Because preserving a seed is not only about putting it in a vault. It is about planting it. Eating it. Sharing it. Selecting it. Passing it to your children and your neighbors.
When communities lose their seeds, they risk losing part of their identity along with them.
In Oaxaca, I met farmers like Francisca Canton and her husband, Jacoba Benitez, who are still farming in their late 60s. They described seed saving as “un trabajo duro”—hard work. And it is a year-long process, from planting to harvest to measuring and storage.
They use oil or soda bottles to store roughly 50 varieties of maize, legumes, and squash. They are using traditional seed-saving methods, they explained, while also learning from CIMMYT technicians about seed selection and more efficient ways to dry seeds.
CIMMYT staff talked repeatedly about consistency and presence—about showing up, listening, learning from farmer networks, and building trust over years. Their recommendations, they say, increasingly depend on context: What works best, where, for whom, and under what conditions?
That is a very different philosophy from assuming there is one technological package—or silver bullet—that can transform agriculture everywhere.
And perhaps that’s one of the lessons we can take from the Green Revolution itself. Science matters enormously. Innovation matters. Technology matters.
But so do culture, biodiversity, economics, relationships, and the knowledge farmers have accumulated over generations.
Farmers are the stewards of biodiversity that is—literally—the future of humanity. Every time farmers share knowledge that strengthens their resilience, a community becomes stronger.
During my time in Oaxaca, I met Víctor López Leyva, the state’s agriculture minister. His message has stayed with me:
“Creer en el campo, creer en las campesinas y los campesinos.”
Believe in the countryside. Believe in farmers.
I could not agree more.
It’s why I am always so excited—and not surprised—to see agricultural innovation being led by farmers, for farmers.
And I also know that a better food system depends on collaboration among farmers, researchers, scientists, policymakers, advocates, cultural experts, and so many others. But collaboration also requires us to recognize who knows the land best.
The Green Revolution taught the world that agricultural science can accomplish extraordinary things. Maybe the green evolution can teach us something equally important—innovation doesn’t begin with a technology or a scientist. It begins by listening to farmers.
Learn more about Food Tank’s ground-truthing work and recent visit with CIMMYT in this video by filmmaker Haven Worley:
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Photo courtesy of Haven Worley
