As the new strain is adopted, it will continue the linear upward trend in wheat yield for at least another decade.

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The National Farmers' Union said 2012 has been one of the hardest for farmers, with arable farmers reporting their poorest wheat yield in 30 years.

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He is credited with saving perhaps a billion people in third world countries from starvation with his development of high-yield disease-resistant wheat varieties.

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We averted the crisis through advances in high-yield, disease-resistant wheat.

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Born on a farm in northeast Iowa in 1914, Norman Borlaug became a plant pathologist who, while working among the poorest farmers in Mexico in the 1940s and 50s, developed a new "miracle wheat" which was able to resist disease and triple the yield.

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So Mr Borlaug first bred wheat cultivars for rust-resistance, a ten-year task, and then crossed them with Norin, a dwarf Japanese variety, to produce a shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which, when properly charged with water and fertiliser, gave three times the yield.

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"If we got three-quarters of the area planted, and the same yield as last year, we could be looking at a crop of only 11m tonnes of wheat when we actually need 14.5m tonnes of wheat for our own domestic use here in the UK, " he said.

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