Science & Tech Quote by Norman Borlaug

Progress, in Borlaug's telling, is less a moral crusade than a statistic with momentum. The sentence is built like a lab report that can pass as prophecy: "Nevertheless" nods to resistance and failure without dignifying them, then the real subject arrives - adoption. Not yields, not hunger, not justice. Adoption. He frames change as a social contagion, and once you accept that premise, the rest reads like inevitability.

The pairing of "small as well as large" is doing political work. It preempts the familiar critique that modern seeds and inputs only serve big landowners, smuggling in an image of democratized technology. It's also a quiet reassurance to funders and governments: this isn't an elite pilot project; it's scaling across classes. Borlaug doesn't have to argue the merits of the "new seeds and new technology" because the proof, for him, is behavioral. Farmers vote with their fields.

Context matters: this is Green Revolution language, emerging from a mid-century world terrified of famine-driven instability and newly decolonized states trying to feed exploding populations. The subtext is Cold War pragmatism: food security as social order, agricultural modernization as an antidote to political upheaval. Even the word "phenomenal" - unusually exuberant for a scientist - signals that he's selling urgency, not just reporting results. The intent is persuasion by accumulation: numbers rising, rapidly, over three years. Don't slow this down. Don't romanticize scarcity. Keep the pipeline of research, fertilizer, irrigation, and policy support open, because the trendline is the argument.