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