Soil searching: A Wknd interview with award-winning scientist Rattan Lal
He helped change how farmers till their land, and has now won the Gulbenkian Prize, or Agriculture’s Nobel. ‘I look back in wonder and forward in hope,’ he says
Rattan Lal’s day begins at 5 am, a routine that has stayed with him since his childhood in Rajound, then a village and now a city in northern Haryana.
Lal was born a bit west of there, in 1944. His family moved from what is now Pakistan’s Punjab province when he was five years old, leaving behind nine acres of land.
As refugees in India, the government granted them 1.5 acres. The quality of soil on their land in Pakistan was poor, they were told, so they could only claim one-sixth of it in India.
As his family scrambled to make a living off that marginal plot, the explanation they were given haunted Lal. He would go on to top his village school, study soil in Punjab and Delhi, move to Ohio in the 1960s.
Over six decades, he would revolutionise sowing techniques in Nigeria, work with the agriculture ministry in Germany and occupy presidentially-appointed posts in Biden’s US.
He has won the Japan Prize (2019), World Food Prize (2020), World Agriculture Prize (2018) and, in India, the Padma Shri (2021). Last month, he won the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity, nicknamed Agriculture’s Nobel and awarded by a jury currently chaired by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
At 79, Lal says he looks back with wonder, and forward with hope. An account of his extraordinary life, in his own words.
On the early years
Rajound was a very small village when I grew up there. There were no roads, running water or electricity. The primary school started out as the space beneath a big banyan tree. Still, it was a privilege, back then, to be able to finish school without leaving home.
I graduated from school in 1959 and stood first in class, with first division grades, which was a big thing back then. My headmaster wrote a letter by hand — a letter I still have — saying that I was a good student, “an erudite speaker”. That was my most precious possession for years.
I was 16 when I moved to Ludhiana to look for work, and a man who lived next door to me there, Bhimsen, became my friend. He worked at Punjab Agricultural College (now University), earning ₹60 a month as a peon for the principal. I said I would love such a job, but he thought I could do more. He knew of my academic record and wanted me to show my certificates to someone at the university, so I could enrol as a student.
I told him I had no money for fees, to which he said the top five students were paid a scholarship of ₹8 a month, and if one could prove one was a refugee, one would be given an additional ₹12.
It was that ₹20 that has brought me so far. I studied under streetlights, walked miles to and from college every day, and topped my class too. I then enrolled with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi, where I got a scholarship again, this time of ₹120, from the Rockefeller Foundation. Eventually, I got into Ohio State University with a teaching assistantship, but I did not have money for airfare. It cost ₹2,650!
On making it to Ohio
A batchmate from IARI said his uncle, an MLA in Haryana named Hardwari Lal, might be able to help. So we went to meet Hardwari in Chandigarh.
Hardwari said I should meet the senior politician Bansi Lal (who would soon be chief minister). But you had to be someone to walk into the state secretariat. So he asked me to pose as his assistant, holding his briefcase. At the gate, he shouted: “Eh, chhore! Jaldi kar, mujhe der ho raha hai! (You, boy! Hurry up, you’re delaying me!).” And that’s how I got in, met Bansi Lal and showed him my certificates. He asked his staff to buy me my ticket, and that’s how I came to Ohio ( Lal is now a professor of soil science there).
The Nigeria experiments
All the awards I have won have their roots in the experiments I conducted in Nigeria for 20 years, starting in 1970, as a soil scientist with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.
All that I did was new back then. A boy from a little village in Haryana changed quite a lot.
I was developing methods to curb soil erosion by not ploughing the land and by growing mulch instead. Soil temperature of ploughed land would often be above 40 degrees Celsius, but under mulch it would be 30 degrees Celsius. This helped tackle soil drought, and it did stem soil erosion in Nigeria, even on steep slopes.
If we take away crop residue, and not burn it; grow a leguminous cover crop during the off season, so it will fix nitrogen; then plant the main crop through that residue turned to mulch, it works! We’ve been following this method in parts of Ohio since I moved here 60 years ago. The problem with the farmers in much of the Global South is that they are poor, so they have to remove and sell the residue for money, or feed it to the cattle.
On wanting to do more in India
I would like to be of service to India, but I do not know how.
I have been heavily involved in the Americas (34 countries) and in Africa (44 countries). I was appointed member of the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development by US President Joe Biden. I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Department of Defence, US, and its Chair since 2023. I am Chair of the Soil Program of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture and its Ambassador for Sustainable Development Issues for 34 countries in the Americas. I was a scientific advisor to the former Minister of Environment of Germany from 2012 to 2018.
However, I have no such appointments in India or elsewhere in South Asia.
I haven’t been to Rajound since 2015, but I see it in my dreams. You can take me out of Rajound, but cannot take Rajound out of me, I guess.
On change that gives him hope
The fact that agriculture is often seen as a solution — for climate, water quality, biodiversity, food security and other issues — instead of a problem, gives me hope. Soil is now treated as a sink of greenhouse gases, not a source. If we want to continue to eat food, this has to be the way we view, and conduct, agricultural activity.
To see efforts that integrate crops with trees and livestock, and thus produce more from less, that gives me hope too.
But so much needs to change. In parts of India, fertilisers are used in the amount of 200 to 250 kg per hectare. It’s a waste and a pollutant. Fertilisers should be used as medicine, and the difference between medicine and poison is the dose.
Then there is flood irrigation, employed in Indian farming, which is a waste of water. We should shift to drip irrigation.
On new frontiers
I want to be able to “talk” to plants that are under stress. They emit molecular-based signals — for drought, virus attacks, pest attacks — that can be detected remotely, and let us intervene before the damage happens. This is the future of agriculture, where less fertiliser, water and pesticides are used to produce more. These transformations are already happening in some parts of the world.
But, around the world, culturally, we still don’t respect farmers. In Ohio, an agriculture graduate gets paid about $35,000 a year, while an IT graduate gets $50,000 and a young doctor starts at $250,000.
We need to pay our agriculture graduates as much as our IT grads and doctors. Only then will the brightest minds turn to this field.
On his greatest achievement
When someone asks me, “Who is your boss?” I tell them it is 500 million small farmers; those people I have worked with and work for, who have two acres or five acres of land.
My boss is not the dean, not the department head, not even the President of the United States... but don’t tell them that!
I work for small farmers around the world.
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