"If I double wheat yields in the UK through breeding, everyone knows what to do with that [crop], so the whole system, the processing system, commodities system, how it works, what properties it has, is already there," explains Mayes.
More recent innovations produced higher-yielding crops, chemical herbicides, insecticides, fungicides and fertilisers that were put to good use in the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, doubling wheat yields in India and boosting Chinese rice harvests by two-thirds between 1970 and 1995.
During the green revolution, for example, Norman Borlaug and others nearly doubled wheat yields by creating plants with short, sturdy stems that could hold a greater load of grain.
By 1956 his disease-resistant varieties had helped Mexico double its wheat production and, for the first time, become self-sufficient in grain.
Infection of a double haploid wheat mapping population segregating for Snn1 with P. nodorum SN15 identified Snn1 as a major SNB QTL at both growth stages, based on the severity of tissue necrosis.
However, the transcription profiles of 41 double haploid wheat lines using the Affymetrix GeneChip® Wheat Genome Array have revealed the putative position of 542 genes identified as major e-QTLs on single-chromosomal regions [ 68].
Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has nearly quadrupled, and its economy has grown tenfold.
In contrast, the frequency of EcoRI/ MseI AFLP among doubled haploid wheat lines derived via androgenesis was less than 0.3% [ 21].
(Park & Orchard, an eclectic restaurant in East Rutherford that offers a celiac-friendly menu, stocks Greens, a double-dark wheat-free beer from Belgium).
For dairy farms in need of more forage, triticale or wheat double cropped with corn silage may be an appropriate cropping strategy.
Some of the increase has come from land pulled out of conservation programs, some from pasture, and some from the double-cropping of wheat and soybeans.
