ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 7:00 pm
The man behind “miracle rice” needs help now to get out of his bed. As he approaches his 100th birthday Thursday, he’s twice widowed, his eyesight is almost gone and his answers to some of the questions about a long life are marked by long silences and halting speech.
But every once in awhile there is a burst of energy in the telephone voice of Henry Beachell, Waverly native, 1930 University of Nebraska graduate and winner of the 1996 World Food Prize.
Why did a guy who likes to be called Hank, a guy from wheat and corn country, spend 75 years of his life working with rice?
“When I got my degree from Kansas State, after getting my Nebraska degree, I was ready to go to work,” Beachell said from his home in Pearland, Texas. “And the only place I could find to work was on rice.”
Why did he keep working long past his 30-year career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture?
“It seemed like the logical thing to do. I’ve never been unemployed a day in my life.”
That remains the case as Henry Monroe Beachell looks forward to a birthday party in his honor at the Methodist Church in Alvin, Texas. He’s still on the payroll, in consultant capacity, at the RiceTec seed company at Alvin, about 30 miles south of Houston.
Way back in 1963, a year marked by civil rights rallies and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the United States, the one-time Waverly farm boy launched a revolution in rice research in the Philippines.
That’s when Beachell, working at the International Rice Research Institute, crossed a shorter, stiff-strawed variety from Taiwan with a taller, pest-resistant variety from Indonesia.
The result, later dubbed “miracle rice,” beat back the boundaries of poverty and chronic food shortage across much of Asia. It and later additions to the same rice family more than doubled the yields of the average Asian rice farmer.
Kenneth Quinn, former U.S. ambassador to Cambodia and now president of the World Food Foundation, felt the benefit of Beachell’s success as a young military officer in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in 1968.
The combination of the new miracle seed and a campaign to build farm-to-market roads had a stunning impact, Quinn said from his Des Moines office.
“It changed places that had been dangerous to be safe, and more healthful, and kids went to school longer.”
Quinn said things worked the same way later in Cambodia.
“We went from 25,000 Khmer Rouge to the last guy surrendering in 1999. And it was a powerful lesson of agricultural innovation in seeds and building farm-to-market roads.”
Earlier in history, he said, “those were things that certainly changed Iowa forever, and I suspect it had a huge impact in Nebraska. So it really was a miracle.”
Beachell shared the $250,000 World Food Prize with Indian scientist and protégé Gurdev Singh Khush.
Khush, working with rice strains developed by his mentor, made more breeding breakthroughs in the 1980s and 1990s.
One of the production gains allowed farmers to harvest two and even three crops from the same fields in the same year, rather than just one.
Quinn said winners of the prize stand out even among high-achieving peers.
“The prize, when it is given, is for an exceptional personal achievement and with demonstrated impact. So we get many nominations for people who have had wonderful, meaningful and important careers.
“But they didn’t have that sort of Nobel-like achievement, where suddenly something they did meant that there would be more food or more nutritious food available.”
Iowa native Norman Borlaug made a similar breeding breakthrough with wheat and won the Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1970. Borlaug, who founded the World Food Prize in 1986, is expected to be among the guests at the Beachell birthday party Thursday.
Nebraska will mark the occasion with a 10:30 a.m. ceremony today at the Capitol in which Gov. Dave Heineman will proclaim Thursday Henry Beachell Day.
Marjorie Kostelnik, dean of the UNL College of Education and Human Sciences, said the university is also forging closer ties between the World Food Prize Youth Institute and the state’s science teachers and students’ research papers.
“I think it’s fair to say this is being done in his name,” Kostelnik said of Beachell. “We’re putting in place a strategy that will honor him and also encourage teachers and students to follow his example in terms of his enthusiasm for science.”
In the state where he was born, Kostelnik said, “Hank” Beachell is “the greatest Nebraskan you may never have heard of.”
Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.