Full Circle - Summer 2004 - Washington State Magazine

Looking north toward Hartline, Grant County, Washington. Photo by George Bedirian South of Hartline, Grant County, Washington. Photo by George Bedirian

Listening to His Heart

by Tim Steury

No matter what you have on the stereo or how preoccupied you are with your week at work or with the upcoming football game or whatever else might pull you back to Pullman for the weekend, as you drive through eastern Washington, you can’t help but be absorbed by those endless stretches of fields, those fields that just go on forever. Sometimes they’re covered with snow and nearly featureless, a monotonous infinity broken only by a distant cluster of buildings or a spectral windmill left behind by another time. Sometimes they’re bright spring and startlingly green. Sometimes they’re absolutely bare, denied even the Russian thistle or bunchgrass tough enough to make it here where rainfall can be as little as eight inches a year, every little green thing rod-weeded or herbicide-sprayed in order to preserve as much precious moisture as possible so that a crop of wheat can be teased from the arid soil next year. And sometimes those fields are all in motion, the relentless prevailing wind out of the southwest lifting the fine particles of soil loose from the surface, blowing them, by the thousands of tons, in a billowing, murky cloud, eastward to wherever the wind drops them.

Steve Jones and Tim Murray want to change all this.

Jones is the winter wheat breeder at Washington State University, Murray a plant pathologist. Together with a small team of postdoctoral and graduate student researchers, and a growing number of farmers who understand that their wild vision might just be possible, Jones and Murray want to make that immense area of eastern Washington—or at least a good chunk of it—less prone to blow, less often bare, even more, if you will, unchanging.

The way they’ll do this is to convince a plant that is content to die after it sets seed in late summer that it actually wants to live.

Unlike many of its wild-grass relatives, wheat is an annual. It must be replanted every year. Somewhere along its coevolutionary journey with agricultural Homo sapiens, probably earlier rather than later, wheat—or more correctly, its selectors—decided that making grain was more efficient if it became an annual.

That genetic history is not clear, says retired U.S. Department of Agriculture wheat breeder Bob Allan, who started working at WSU in the 1950s with legendary breeder Orville Vogel. Wheat derives from three separate genomes, none of which shows any perennial tendency.

Early farmers probably selected wheat ancestors for annual-growth habits, recognizing that the best wheat, like the best weed, as Allan points out, is an annual. Put everything into your seed to regrow next year, with no need to put energy into the relatively uncertain roots. At least that has been the conventional wisdom for the past 10,000 years or so.

Indeed, annual plants do have certain advantages over perennials. Among them, says Murray, is that the plant’s death provides a natural deterrent to insect pests. Annual wheat dies in July or August, leaving nothing green in the sunbaked fields to harbor insect pests.

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A Partial Pantheon of Washington Wheat Geneticists

Soon after William Spillman arrived at Washington State Agricultural College in 1894, he realized that eastern Washington was one of the best areas in the world for growing wheat. However, the varieties available to farmers were not suited to Washington’s growing conditions. He started an ambitious breeding program to develop better hybrid varieties. Scientists of the time believed hybridization was entirely random. Even though Gregor Mendel had discovered the principles of heredity in 1865, his work was unknown to the scientific world. In the course of his breeding program, Spillman noticed a predictability after the second generation of what types would appear. He had, as had three European geneticists, independently rediscovered Mendel’s laws of inheritance. Also, by 1911, Spillman’s varieties were grown on a half million acres.

Edward Gaines took a leave from his position at Washington State College to earn his doctorate in genetics from Harvard in 1921. The first WSC faculty member to be granted a paid sabbatical, he visited England, Sweden, and Russia in 1930 to collect wheat lines that had resistance to rusts and smuts, persistent problems in eastern Washington. Gaines concentrated on perfecting field-testing techniques and varietal comparisons. He recognized that varieties should be selected and tested where they eventually would be grown. Interestingly, he was criticized for two varieties he developed. They were so successful that they produced large grain surpluses for several years.

After Orville Vogel received his doctorate from WSC in 1939, with Gaines as his major professor, he soon began to take charge of the wheat-breeding program. Although his early work concentrated on shattering and smut, he eventually realized the need for a shorter, stiffer wheat plant to support the increased weight of the heads of new varieties bolstered by commercial fertilizers. After years of breeding, with the help of Masami (Dick) Nagamitsu at the Lind Research Station, Vogel released the semidwarfing and stripe rust-resistant “Gaines” variety. This semidwarfing characteristic established the foundation upon which Norman Borlaug produced the “Green Revolution.”

A friend of Gaines and Vogel, botanist Hannah Aase was recognized worldwide for her work in cytogenetics. She published widely on the heredity of cereal grains. A gifted writer as well as geneticist, in one of her articles she wrote, “Weed gardens around the world are scrutinized ever more closely for any wild and little-known cereal or grass that might contribute in some small way toward a better understanding of how nature builds her species and also, possibly, toward the development of economically desirable forms.”

Hired by Vogel in 1957, Robert Allan continues to work closely with both the USDA Agricultural Research Service and WSU on wheat breeding projects. Allan developed the variety Madsen, the most widely planted wheat in the state during the 1990s.