Memoriam: Loyd Johnson, 1927-2012

My father, Loyd Johnson, died this past Good Friday. For those of you who don’t know much about him, here’s a thumbnail sketch. My dad was born in 1927 in rural North Alabama near the upper reaches of Cotaco Creek. He was the middle child of IBD Johnson (a sharecropper & singing master) and his wife Ruth Humphrey (a famed pie maker), and he grew up picking cotton, playing in the swimming hole, and attending a two-room school. He was sent to Puerto Rico to repair Navy planes at the close of WWII, where he found the tropics to his liking. After one Chicago winter, where he had gone to study Nuclear Physics, he returned to Alabama to study something that might take him back to the tropics, eventually graduating from the Alabama Politechnic Institute (now Auburn University) in Agricultural Engineering before taking a job with the United Fruit Co. (Chiquita Bananas) in La Lima, Honduras. That’s where he met my mother, Ester Banegas, recently returned from school at Perkinston (Mississippi). They married and had three children: Theresa Ann, Thomas Patrick and Loyd Carl.

My dad took a job with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1960, which took us to the Philippines to become part of a grand adventure in feeding the world, which was later dubbed “The Green Revolution.” My father laid out the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños and managed the various field trials, including the first batch of IR8 (Miracle Rice) developed in 1962 by Peter Jennings and Hank Beachell. This variety was later found by S. K. De Datta to produce 5 tons per hectare with no fertilizer (5 times the traditional rice yield of other varieties using fertilizer. We later moved to Colombia, where my father laid out the Centro International de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), and later invented two important pieces of equipment that farmers could have manufactured locally. One was a portable rice thresher, made from an oil drum, which allows farmers to thresh in the field and carry home only the grain. The second was a tractor-powered pump capable of moving 2 cubic meters of water per second. After assignments in Ecuador and Burma, my parents settled in rural Alabama where my father was born and raised.

My mother died eight years ago, and my father later married Colleen Turney (Lemmond) who had attended the same school at Cotaco. Dad and Colleen were living happily in Hartselle, Alabama, until my father developed Parkinson’s and recently suffered a debilitating stroke. He died in peace surrounded by his family.