Hello, young scholars! Strap in because we're diving into some historical juiciness! Today, we'll discuss Lysenkoism, a "super-crop" saga of the Soviet Union that somehow influenced China's agriculture too, and also Mao Zedong's somewhat disastrous attempts to shake up farming in China. 🌾🇨🇳

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who claimed he had found the ultimate cheat codes for farming! He said his techniques could make crops like rice and wheat produce up to sixteen times more food than traditional methods. Imagine that: one rice grain turns into a whole rice cake! 🍙

Remember the Fyre Festival disaster? Promised as the luxury music festival of the century and turned out to be a huge scam? Lysenkoism was like the Fyre Festival of agriculture. Lots of promises, but a total disaster in reality.

China was pretty buddy-buddy with the USSR back in the day. The Chinese were taught to consider Lysenko the ultimate guru of agriculture. They even changed textbooks and renamed stuff to honor him. It's like renaming "Biology" to "Lysenko-ology"!

In 1958, Mao Zedong drafted an eight-point plan for farming based on Lysenko's theories. The eight magical commands were:

• Use new breeds and seeds 🌱
• Plant closely 🌾🌾🌾
• Plant deeply 🕳️
• Increase fertilization 🐄💩
• Use new farm tools 🚜
• Improve field management 🗺️
• Control pests 🦗🚫
• Increase irrigation 💦