The histories of Mexican agriculture and the Green Revolution provide people, places, and agricultural traditions and innovations through which to explore the reciprocal influence of the early 20th century sciences of molecular biology, genetics, and ecology on agricultural research and practice. The people are Mexican agronomist, ethnobotanist, and “prolífico investigador de la agricultura tradicional," Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi and plant pathologist, geneticist, and Noble Laureate, Norman Borlaug. The places are three valleys in Mexico; Río Yaqui, Toluca, and México.

México is an evolutionary and cultural “center of origin” for maize, magueys, nopal, papaya, tomatillo, and tomato among other foods. Mexican indigenous farmers developed farming systems appropriate to their environments including milpas, chinampas, and acequias. Hernández Xolocotzi documented the indigenous traditional farmers´ cultivation of Mexico´s food biodiversity and applied their knowledge to his understanding of agroecosystems.

Mexico is also the birthplace to the Green Revolution. By shuttling between the valleys, Borlaug first bred the Green Revolution´s high yielding cultivars of wheat, developed through shuttle breeding, while working for the the Programa Cooperativo de Agricultura, a collaboration between the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation. Borlaug´s wheat, together with maize and rice, accelerated the modernization of agriculture and substantially increased the agricultural yields of cereals through the application of molecular biology and genetics principles to plant breeding.

Ultimately, this historical narrative focuses on scales of knowledge; from the landscapes of ecology to the minutia of molecular biology and plant genetics; from centuries of honing agricultural practices to the compressed cycles of shuttle breeding. Indigenous agricultural knowledge rooted in time and place and modern agricultural knowledge rooted in the molecular sciences and ecology are evaluated with respect to their contributions to our understanding of the complexities of biochemical-environmental relations.

The juxtaposition of indigenous farming practices and the Oficina de Estudios Especiales within Mexico´s valleys and works of Hernández Xolocotzi and Borlaug provide a frame within which we may better assess current science-based claims concerning increasing and securing our food supplies while maintaining the environmental integrity and sustainability of lands and waters.