🌾 GrainQuest

Two real stories

The Green Revolution

From the 1940s to the 1970s, new high-yield wheat and rice, grown with fertiliser and irrigation, greatly raised harvests in Mexico, India, Pakistan and elsewhere, and is credited with heading off famine. It also had costs that later generations are still paying in places: falling water tables where wells were pumped hard, fertiliser running off into rivers, and far fewer local varieties being planted.

The Leningrad seed bank

During the siege of Leningrad (1941–1944), staff of the plant institute founded by Nikolai Vavilov guarded one of the world's largest seed collections. Several of them starved to death rather than eat the seeds and tubers in their care, because the collection was the future of farming.

GrainQuest's model is a simplified teaching model, not a forecast. The numbers show the shape of the trade-offs, not real yields.

Why is the plant enzyme that feeds the world so slow?

Every grain of wheat starts with an enzyme called RuBisCO, which grabs carbon dioxide from the air. It is famously slow and easily confused. From our friends at Fold Commons, a sister project: look at real protein structures on foldcommons.org (opens in the same tab, in English).