Shykh Seraj — television presenter, development journalist and the founder-director and head of news of Channel i — was born in Chandpur on this day in 1954. For four and a half decades he has used the media for one purpose: the farmer, the field and the food the country grows.

He first reached the country through Mati O Manush ("Soil and People") on Bangladesh Television. It began as a fifty-minute fortnightly called Amar Desh; he turned it into a weekly and made it the programme every farmer knew. In the 1980s, before television reached most homes, its episodes were watched in village markets and tea stalls.

Persuading farmers to try the new high-yielding rice was not easy. "They told me, we will not eat that rubber rice," he has recalled. As the scientists' varieties improved, so did his methods of winning farmers over, and the country's rice harvest has more than tripled since.

On his own channel the work continued as Hridoye Mati O Manush, with the Farmers' Budget dialogues, the Farmers' World Cup and reporting from farms on every continent. He is credited as one of the central figures behind the transformation of Bangladesh's agriculture over the past decades.

An Ashoka Fellow, he received the FAO's A.H. Boerma Award in 2009 for journalism on food security and poverty, the Ekushey Padak and the Independence Award, Bangladesh's highest civilian honour.

The Agro News wishes him a happy birthday.

Photo: Shykh Seraj at the press briefing before the Farmers' World Cup Cricket, 2011 — Hridoye Mati O Manush Channel i from Bangladesh, Bangladesh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)