This is the story of a Tamil Brahmin who refused to let his boss throw out a tray of seedlings. They were months from being destroyed. Those seedlings are why Indian cane yielded 50% more in Punjab, and why South Africa's sugar industry ran on Coimbatore cane. Story originates in Coimbatore.... Charles Barber, the Govt Sugarcane Expert, and his assistant Tiruvadi Sambasiva Venkatraman wanted to try something new with sugarcane: cross the sweet "noble" cane with Saccharum spontaneum, a dry wild grass growing beside their campus. During that time, India was buying its sugar from Java. The 1st year, every seedling died.... The 2nd year, Barber was touring north India. Venkatraman raised the seedlings in an ordinary field bed and spotted a few that looked different. He sent a telegram. Barber hurried back, looked, and called them grass. He felt he had been made a fool of. He ordered them destroyed... Venkatraman pushed back. Barber agreed to keep them on 1 condition: not an hour of official time. A few months later the seedlings grew sugarcane joints. The cross was a noble cane called Vellai with a wild Coimbatore spontaneum. It gave Co 205, released in 1918. In Punjab it yielded about 50% more than the local canes and replaced them in 6-8 years. Barber retired the next year. Venkatraman ran the station until 1942. Then the Co canes left India. When streak disease hit South Africa's Uba cane, Co 281 was sent from Coimbatore and replaced it. In 1938 seed from Venkatraman's cross of Co 421 and Co 312 went to Natal. One seedling became NCo 310. Ten years after its 1945 release it was producing more than half of South Africa's sugar. By the 1960s, Coimbatore canes were grown in 22 countries. Sources: INSA Biographical Memoir of T.S. Venkataraman (insaindia.res.in/BM/BM11_861…); Current Science 106(8), 1146-49 (2014); ICAR-SBI history; Natarajan/SASRI, "Conventional Sugarcane Breeding in South Africa" (Am. J. Plant Sci. 2013) Photo: T.S. Venkatraman, c. 1930s.