Science and Agricultural Production” by Ingrid Palmer. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva, 1972.

Science and Agricultural Production provides a comprehensive coverage of the factors of production underlying the Green Revolution, and discusses in detail the constraints that inhibit their use and the specific implications of such constraints for a social, economic and ecological analysis for less developed countries. Ingrid Palmer considers fertilizer usage to be the principal factor underlying the Green Revolution. On the basis of a fitted rank correlation between fertilizer usage and the yields of rice and wheat for various countries, the author concludes that, given adequate soil moisture, agricultural productivity can be greatly increased with improvements in the level of fertilizer application alone, irrespective of the varieties grown. The significance of the High Yielding Varieties (HYVs) begins to appear only when the fertilizer application is about 10 times the present actual dosage. Three characteristics of the HYVs, the leaf erectness, the high tillering rate, and the leaf area, have been discussed as the chief activators of nutrient uptake associated with a high conversion rate of fertilizer to grain formation, through the process of photosynthesis.