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Much of the credit goes to rice scientists like Dr. Henry M. "Hank" Beachell, a soft-spoken 94-year-old man who received the World Food Prize in 1996. That's the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for agriculture--yet few would recognize his name.

The remarkable achievements of Beachell and his colleagues are documented in Precious Seeds: The legacy of Hank Beachell and fellow rice scientists, a new 27-minute video produced by the National Agricultural Library of the US Department of Agriculture; Garrett Farms of Danbury, Texas; RiceTec, Inc. of Alvin, Texas; and AGCOM International, which specializes in videos on agriculture and the environment.

Beachell is currently in his fourth rice breeding career. The first was 32 years in Texas, then a decade each in the Philippines and Indonesia, and back in Texas.

Ironically, the man who has helped increase global rice production so much isn't from rice country. Hank Beachell grew up on a Nebraska wheat farm.

"It was quite lonesome out there," Beachell recalls on the video. "I'd sit and watch those trains go by and say, 'Someday I'm going to be on that train and see part of the world.' I never knew I'd end up down in Texas, then years later in Asia."

In 1925, Beachell enrolled in the University of Nebraska, to study agriculture, then went to graduate college at Kansas State University. That's where he set his life goal-to be a wheat breeder with the US Department of Agriculture.

But upon graduation, USDA's only opening for a wheat breeder went to Beachell's best friend. Instead, USDA offered Beachell a position as rice breeder at the Texas A&M University Research and Extension Center, near Beaumont.

"Jokingly, I said that was a lot better than starving to death," Beachell recalls on the video. "But it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me."

Plant breeding, as we know it today, didn't exist in Texas when Beachell arrived in 1931.

"Hank Beachell was really the first person in Texas to use crossbreeding to genetically tailor varieties that would have the qualities that the farmers needed in the field, and that consumers wanted," said Dr. Susan McCouch, rice geneticist, Cornell University, and executive producer of Precious Seeds.

The first improved rice variety that Hank Beachell developed was Texas Patna, released in 1942. It promised higher yields and profits-but there was a serious problem. There was no way to multiply the seeds of Texas Patna for distribution.

The Texas rice industry raised funds to produce the seeds. That led to formation of the Texas Rice Improvement Association, which bought 600 acres that became the site of today's Beaumont Center.

Over 32 years, Hank Beachell developed nine improved varieties, including Century Patna 231, Bluebonnet, and Belle Patna, that eventually made up well over half of the U.S. long grain acreage.

In 1963, Beachell made a move that changed his life…and the lives of hundreds of millions of rice farmers and consumers in Asia. He accepted a position as rice breeder at the fledgling International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.

There, Beachell and colleagues selected a semidwarf rice that could double or triple yields of traditional tropical varieties. But it had a serious drawback: poor grain quality.

Pending famine for millions in Asia outweighed grain quality, so IRRI released the rice as IR8, the first semidwarf variety to be widely grown in the tropics, in early 1967.

IR8 and better semidwarfs that followed launched the "Green Revolution" in rice. Today, such rices keep at least 1 billion people alive. Most are in Asia.

In 1972, Beachell moved to an IRRI project in Indonesia. The country was importing 1.7 million tons of rice yearly, but when Beachell left in 1982, rice production had almost doubled, and Indonesia had reached rice self-sufficiency.

The video also documents how Dr. Charles Bollich, who succeeded Beachell as rice breeder at Beaumont, developed Lemont, America's first widely grown semidwarf rice variety.

"Forty years ago, we were on the verge of starvation in Asia, and through increased rice production, we were able to avoid that," Beachell recalls in the video. "Now we're facing a similar period. What can we do now to start a program to feed the rice world 40 years from now?"

At almost a century old, Dr. Hank Beachell isn't looking back-he's looking to the future!

Precious Seeds was produced and directed by Lawrence J. Klaas of AGCOM International. It was scripted by Dr. Thomas R. Hargrove, editor-in-chief of AGCOM and www.PlanetRice.net

Order copies of the video for US$49.95 from AGCOM International, 30 Meridian Circle, Rohnert Park, CA 94928, USA. Phone/fax: US toll free, 800 598-3372; international, 707 664-8146. Email: larryklaas@aol.com.