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Borlaug landed in the valley in the 1940s as an agricultural adviser for the Rockefeller Foundation while the farmers around him were beset by a fungus known as stem rust.

In oats, crown rust, stem rust, barley yellow dwarf virus, oat smut, and other diseases are seen in North America.

Borlaug would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the years he had spent shuttling between Mexico City and the Yaqui Valley, growing thousands upon thousands of kinds of wheat, and carefully noting their traits: this kind resisted one type of stem rust, but not another; this kind produced good yields, but made bad bread; and so on.

There she found the Rockefeller Foundation's Norman E Borlaug, who was trying to breed wheat which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.

A classic product of the Midwest land-grant colleges that are one of America’s greatest successes, he found his way to a dusty plant-breeding station in a desolate part of Mexico, where he figured out how to breed wheat that combined high yields with resistance to the ancient plague of stem rust.