Terenty Mal'tsev was born on October 29, 1895, into a poor peasant family in the village of Mal'tsevo, which at that time was located in the Krivskaya volost of the Shadrinsk district of the Perm province, and is now the administrative center of the Mal'tsevsky rural council in the Shadrinsk district of the Kurgan region.

His parents were Old Believers and led a modest household consisting of one working horse and a cow. His father, Semyon Abramovich, did not want his son to receive an education and did not allow him to attend school. Therefore, Terenty studied independently, reading all the books he could find, and continued self-education throughout his life. His personal library contained about 6,000 volumes.

Before serving in the army, he worked with his father. In 1916 and 1917, he served in the army, and then, from 1917 to 1921, he was a prisoner in Germany, where he worked at a sugar factory. In 1919, along with other prisoners of war, he created a Russian section within the Communist Party of Germany.

After returning from captivity, from 1921 to 1924, Mal'tsev worked as the chairman and then the secretary of the village council in his native village. In 1925, he organized an agricultural circle and, together with fellow villagers, created a cooperative for joint land cultivation.

In 1927, he received a package from the Leningrad Institute of Applied Botany containing 200 grams of wheat and a request to conduct variety trials. The wheat yielded a good harvest and was recommended for cultivation in the Trans-Ural region.

In 1930, during the establishment of the collective farm 'Lenin's Testament' in the Shadrinsk district, he was unanimously elected as the field manager, a position he held until the end of his life. In 1935, he became a delegate to the 2nd All-Union Congress of Shock Workers of Collective Farms.

Since 1939, Mal'tsev was a member of the VKP(b), and from 1952, the CPSU. He participated in the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition of the USSR in 1939, 1940, and 1941.

In February 1947, at a plenum of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), he spoke about his method. From 1950, Mal'tsev headed the Shadrinsk Experimental Station, established at the collective farm by the directive of I.V. Stalin. From 1951, he developed a non-inversion soil cultivation system, which included a plow of his own design and a five-field crop rotation system.

In 1952, he participated in the World Congress of Supporters of Peace in Vienna. On August 7, 1954, an All-Union conference took place in the village of Mal'tsevo, lasting three days. More than 1,000 people attended instead of the invited 300. In the following 2.5 years, about 3,500 people came to learn about the new system. The scientific part of the conference was led by T.D. Lysenko, with whom Mal'tsev collaborated on branching wheat. Later, he spoke of Lysenko: 'When he was needed, he was raised to the heavens; when he became unnecessary, he was thrown into a ditch.'

Mal'tsev did not support Khrushchev's idea of planting corn in the Trans-Ural region, for which Khrushchev called him a 'wheat aristocrat' and downgraded his status to a deputy of the RSFSR. He met with Brezhnev twice, had government communication phones at his home, but rarely used them.

In 1969, he was a delegate to the 3rd All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers and became an honorary academician of VASKHNIIL. He was a delegate to nine congresses of the CPSU and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 2nd and 5th convocations, as well as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Kurgan Regional Council since 1943.

Under his leadership, four varieties of wheat were developed and zoned: Shadrinskaya, Vera, Kurganskaya-1, and Kollektyvnaya-2.

Terenty Semenovich Mal'tsev passed away on August 11, 1994, in the village of Mal'tsevo and was buried in his native village.