29 June 2024, Bangladesh: I jumped off the horse cart and landed on the sandy beach of Char Bongram, an island in the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh, dotted with tough-looking, nondescript plants somehow surviving where no others could.
“You’re standing on grasspea,” said Shiv Agrawal, a pulses breeder with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), as his eyes scanned the landscape. “The farmers here just sow the seed and come back a hundred days later and harvest the pods, which are…