Our daily bread in 2050

These are the good times.

I was driving through the country last Saturday, looking at deer happily chowing down in wheat fields. Everyplace is a drive-through if you’re a herbivore at this time of year.

It’s a simple historical fact that wheat farming has been central to American agriculture since the country was young. And today wheat grown in the U.S. supplies American consumers and millions of other people around the world with largequantities of economical nutrition.

Even a geologist like myself knows that much about the king of grains.

But I was recently startled to learn that the tempera...