They had done it! They had actually done it, despite the heavy resistance. They were home free!
14
It was late, nearly four in the afternoon, when William Bormett left the podium and went back to his seat at the speakers’ table. His audience in the big hall, mostly young agriculture students, was standing and applauding him. Each of the four previous days had seen the same conclusion. The same beginning, for that matter. In the morning he was introduced, and immediately he launched into the story of the Bormett farms, beginning with his grandfather’s immigration to Iowa. By late afternoon he had brought his audience up to date, including his plans to increase his land to corn to twenty thousand acres.
Dr. Nikolai Lubiako, dean of the School of Agricultural Engineering here at the University of Moscow, had gotten up from his seat. As Bormett sat down, he raised his arms for the applause to end.
“An amazing achievement,” his unamplified voice thundered throughout the great hall. “A tribute to the ongoing dedication of a family to agriculture.”
Catherine was seated in the front row, off to one side, and Bormett winked at her. She winked back, although it was obvious that she was very tired.
This trip had been hard on her. The food had not agreed with her system, and their room at the Metropole Hotel downtown, although nice by Soviet standards, was not up to hers when it came to cleanliness, so she really had not been able to relax.
For the first couple of days she had faithfully attended his morning and afternoon lectures, but then, since each day’s talks would be the same, she had gone sightseeing and shopping with their Intourist guide in the mornings. Now, at the end of the fifth day, with several more days stretching ahead of them, it looked as if she wanted to do nothing more than go back to their room, take a nice hot bath (if the water pressure was up tonight), and crawl into bed.
Bormett couldn’t have agreed more. Although his reception here had surprised — and in some ways exhilarated — him, he too was tired.
“This afternoon we have a special surprise for you,” Dr. Lubiako was saying, and Bormett looked up as a tall, blond young man left the audience and joined the dean at the podium.
“Here with us today we have Arkadi Fedorovich Kedrov, a distinguished man whom many of you know as the special agriculture correspondent for Izvestia. Some of you, perhaps, do not know that he is a graduate of our school and has traveled extensively through the American farmbelt states of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.”
The applause was thunderous, and Bormett was confused. He hadn’t been expecting this. At this point Dr. Lubiako usually made a number of nice remarks about him, and then dismissed the session. Afterward, there was half an hour or so of individual questions from students who had remained behind, and then he and Katy returned to their hotel for dinner or attended a reception the university arranged for them.
Two students brought in another podium, which they set up a few feet from the one in front of Dr. Lubiako and Kedrov. Lubiako gestured for Bormett to come up.
Bewildered, he got to his feet amidst more applause, and approached them.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov said, smiling.
“I am sorry, Mr. Bormett, for this last-minute surprise, but Arkadi Fedorovich was kind enough to break away from his very busy day to join us,” Dr. Lubiako said.
“We will keep it very short,” Kedrov said. “No longer than a half-hour. You must be very tired.”
“I am,” Bormett mumbled, still mystified at exactly what was going on. “But we’re keeping what to a half-hour?”
“Oh, please forgive me,” Dr. Lubiako said. “I am sorry. Arkadi Fedorovich here has agreed to an informal debate with you on the hybrid issue.”
“What?” Bormett asked, stepping back.
Kedrov reached out and drew him back. “Dr. Lubiako is a very old friend, but like many academicians he tends to make everything seem more formal than it is. I had hoped that you and I could speak to the young people here about hybrids. Corn, if you’d like. I’m sure that you could say much about the subject.”
“I’m very tired,” Bormett said. There was no way he wanted to get into any kind of debate with these people.
“I understand, sir,” Kedrov said smoothingly. His breath smelled of cloves. “And I promise you I will hold it to no more than thirty minutes.”
“I still don’t see what you want from me.”
Kedrov glanced at Dr. Lubiako. “I’ll just ask you a few questions, and we can discuss the answers.”
“What kind of questions?” Bormett asked.
The audience had sat perfectly quiet throughout all of this, and Bormett felt ill at ease standing here like this.
“Well, I, for one, am worried about hybrids. I think we should move away from them.”
“Impossible,” Bormett said. He was on very familiar territory now. “Without hybrids — at least in corn — our output would drop by seventy percent, and the chance for corn blight and other diseases would be raised dramatically. All modern farming would come to an end.”
Kedrov laughed and slapped Bormett on the shoulder as he turned to face the audience. Dr. Lubiako backed off and took his seat.
“Mr. Bormett has kindly consented to discuss the question of hybrids with us this afternoon,” Kedrov said, and there was more applause. “When I told him I thought we should move away from the trend toward hybrid planting, he disagreed wholeheartedly.”
There was a smattering of applause, and Kedrov turned back to Bormett. “Won’t you share your views with us?”
For just a moment Bormett felt very uncomfortable. But then he looked down at Catherine, who was smiling, and she nodded for him to go ahead. It was a subject that he was familiar with.
“Without hybrid seeds,” he began, “farming would be pushed back fifty years.”
“Could you be more specific, Mr. Bormett?” Kedrov asked.
“As I told you just a moment ago, without hybrids the output of my farm would drop by as much as seventy percent. And unless the weather remained nearly perfect for the entire growing season, which it never does in Iowa, then there would be a very good chance for disaster.”
“But aren’t we inviting disaster by the very use of hybrids?” Kedrov asked.
“I don’t understand.”
“The genetic base of our major food crops the world over is narrowing, Mr. Bormett. Narrowing at a frightening rate. Most Western agriculture — and I’m talking now about the major crops: corn, wheat, and soybeans — is based on less than thirty species.”
“If that is the correct number, those hybrids have been engineered for exactly the soil and climate in which they will be grown. Hybridization is why, in the United States, we will produce four hundred million tons of corn this year.”
“If all goes well, Mr. Bormett,” Kedrov rejoined. “If all goes well. Diversity is the first line of defense, however, against diseases and pests. Look at the outbreak of wheat stem rust in 1954, or the southern leaf blight in 1970 in which tens of thousands of acres of corn were destroyed. All because the acres were planted with a single hybrid that happened to be susceptible.”
Bormett had to smile at the simplistic view. “Surely, as an agriculture expert, you understand that there is no such thing as a guaranteed crop. Even the best of hybrids can be attacked. But no more so than a natural variety.”
“And your solution to that problem is…?”
“New and more hardy hybrids.”
“Hybrids, which cannot reproduce themselves, cannot be saved for seed? Hybrids that are totally dependent upon fertilizers and pesticides?”