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Faith, Hope & Charity

Faith, Hope & Charity

BY JOEL EBERTJOEL.EBERT@CAPJOURNAL.COM

A little bit of faith, hope and charity from a “radi-cal” South Dakota wheat breeder born over a century ago is all it took to change the world. Armed with a fistful of seeds and unconventional thinking, Edgar S. McFadden used his landlady’s garden plot and an experimental farm near Highmore to do what was thought to be impossible. And although he may not be the most recognized name in South Dakota lore these days, that may change if a researcher from South Dakota State University has anything to say about it.

The second of three children, McFadden was born in Webster, S.D., in 1891. His parents, James and Beatrice, homesteaded in Day County after traveling from New York. James established a creamery in Webster that sold milk, cream and eggs directly to customers. As a boy, McFadden helped his father by making deliveries.

The young man was forced to grow up quickly. When McFadden turned 13, his father was injured in a brutal accident with the family’s bull. He was nearly gored to death. The incident thrust the boy into the father’s place of running the family farm. He had to shoulder the weight of supporting his parents and sister, Lillie.

Like many other children around the turn of the century, Lillie died at a young age. Although the exact details of her death are still unknown, it is known that she was a frail child. Sadly for the McFaddens, Lillie wasn’t the only child they were forced to bury at a young age. Edgar’s brother, Clarence, who was born in 1898, died the year after he was born.

After Lillie’s passing in 1908, the family left South Dakota for warmer climes. First they tried California before deciding to head to Texas. They purchased a 600-acre ranch and raised cattle and wheat.

Living near the western portion of the Texas-Mexico border, young McFadden had encounters with Mexican revolutionary general Pancho Villa. Those days Villa was busy terrorizing people on both sides of the bor-der. With McFadden hiding behind a rock, he shot Villa and his banditos – with a Kodak camera. McFadden’s daughter, Phyllis, would later recall the occasion to Kevin Kephart, vice president for research at South Dakota State University, saying her father told her, “We heard the guns a blazing.”

Such tales have come to light today thanks to the dedication of Kephart, a history enthusiast as well as a scientist, who has spent two years studying the life and work of McFadden.

For two years – 1908 to 1910 – McFadden received an education in agriculture while in the fields. From May until September, he would follow the wheat har-vests from Texas to Canada in what is now known to agricultural scientists as the Puccinia pathway. It was named after the disease-causing fungus, Puccinia graminis. The fungus causes stem rust, a disease that had plagued wheat fields up and down the Great Plains in McFadden’s day. It was capable of turning a healthy crop into shriveled grains.

As he traveled through the wheat fields of the Great Plains, McFadden began to theorize that stem rust was pushed north by spring and summer weather and driv-en south in autumn. His theory was unconventional – at the time, most scientists thought stem rust spores were harbored by barberry plants and the spores were readily transmitted from those nearby sources.

“McFadden realized that the pathway of Puccinia, the genus of rust, started in south Texas, and, perhaps, he wanted to combat rust at its origin,” says Amir Ibrahim, a wheat breeder at Texas A&M University.

Those days, stem rust was a major headache for pro-ducers and consumers alike. In the late 1800s, South Dakota was a powerhouse for wheat production. In fact, between 1887 and 1902, South Dakota experienced a major wheat boom. During that period, the town of Eureka was the largest inland shipping point in the world.

While still living in South Dakota, McFadden saw firsthand the difficulties that farmers faced with stem rust. In 1904, wheat fields throughout the country were threatened by it. It’s been estimated stem rust was responsible for as much as a 70 percent loss of yield in some places in South Dakota.

After two years of following the wheat harvest, McFadden and his family moved back to South Dakota in 1911. Despite only having an eighth-grade educa-tion, the eager young boy enrolled in the South Dakota School of Agriculture, which served as a secondary education for rural people who couldn’t attend high school.

While at the agriculture school, McFadden became acquainted with a scientist who piqued his interest in cereal grains – Manley Champlin. McFadden worked as an assistant on small grains research from 1913 until 1917. The two men dedicated their time to the study of wheat, barley and other crops, while rediscovering the work of Gregor Mendel, who had largely been ignored for his experiments of plant hybridization in the 1860s.

Dakota State University has anything to say about it.

The second of three children, McFadden was born in

For two years – 1908 to 1910 – McFadden received

See MCFADDEN, C6

Father of Hope wheat, Edgar Mc-Fadden began his early experiments of crossbreeding wheat in the back-yard garden owned by his Brookings-based landlady in 1916. (Courtesy of the South Dakota Heritage Museum)

Dakota Life Friday, August 29, 2014capjournal.comC6

As early as 1913 – even before gradu-ating from the ag school – McFadden began to think about crossbreeding common wheat with emmer. It was a cross which the scientific community agreed was impossible. Emmer was an ancient relative of bread wheat which, Mark Carleton had observed in 1901, was resistant to rust. McFadden thought crossbreeding emmer with Marquis hard red spring wheat would be a natu-ral solution to a longstanding problem. The only issue was emmer had 28 chro-mosomes, while Marquis wheat had 42.

“The odds were working against McFadden when he crossed Marquis and Yaroslav emmer to develop Hope spring wheat,” said Ibrahim.

Although conventional wisdom was stacked against him, McFadden was encouraged by Champlin to continue his education with wheat. He began build-ing the germplasm base, which he called pure line selections, at his Webster farm as early as 1913. By 1916, he made four different crossbreeds in a garden owned by his landlady in Brookings.

Ibrahim said McFadden did some-thing else unusual – he did not use tissue culture techniques and special media to rescue the tiny embryos. Yet despite his strange tactics, McFadden had some minor success.

“Only a few poorly developed seeds resulted from the pollination of the flowers of several heads,” McFadden later noted. But those initial seeds were enough to replant the following year. From many seeds that resulted from the crossbreeding in 1916, only a single seed was viable and produced a plant. In 1917, this single plant produced about 100 seeds.

Although he was quietly on his way to becoming a radical plant breeder, he had to set aside his experiments and answer the “call to the colors.”

Following the early backyard suc-cesses of his crossbreeding experiment, McFadden became a field assistant for the United States Department of Agriculture in 1918. He was stationed in Highmore and as soon as he landed the job in March, he planted his 100 seeds from his Brookings garden days.

In May, McFadden married Mabelle Lucile Blakeslee, who was the niece of the landlady with the garden. Less than a month after their marriage, McFadden boarded a westbound train for Washington-based Camp Lewis, where he entered basic training in prep-aration to fight in World War I.

Members of the McFadden family had been in combat since the Revolutionary War and so the newlywed was eager to serve his country. But that pride didn’t stop him from taking an opportunity to tend to the needs of his main interest.

In August, McFadden received a 33-day harvest furlough, allowing him to look after his precious experimental wheat before reporting back to camp. Just two months after returning to Camp Lewis, World War I ended after the Germans and the Allies signed an armistice. McFadden, who never left the U.S., hadn’t seen a day of combat.

He was discharged from the army in early 1919. That allowed him to continue to focus on his work while employed by the USDA. But the job wouldn’t last for long. By 1921, a lack of federal fund-ing eliminated his position, but not his dream of finding a solution to stem rust.

McFadden was forced, once again, to become a private farmer on his Webster farm.

For the next several years, luck would not be on his side. His wheat fields were threatened by hail damage, drought and rust. Even as he continued to experi-ment with crossbreeds, the stem rust epidemic seemed to be getting worse. The most significant outbreak of stem rust Day County had ever experienced occurred in 1923.

Despite the epidemic, McFadden man-aged to find some success that year. He kept a close eye on his seeds, which he was allowed to take from his research in Highmore. Even as stem rust was pervasive throughout the fields of his farm, McFadden recorded 63 naturally

crossed phenotypes. The following year, McFadden used

those 63 selections and managed to grow three separate rust-free lines – H44-24, H49-24 and H35-24. Salvation from stem rust had finally arrived, even if no one else was aware of it. McFadden had not only defied conventional wisdom but when he tested H49 – the most promis-ing of the three – the following spring, no rust flecks were found.

Although the variety H49 would be registered under the name “Hope” in 1925, new research conducted by Kephart puts an interesting spin on McFadden’s train of thought.

After years of thinking Hope was named because it offered just that – sal-vation from years of problems associat-ed with stem rust – Kephart unearthed new documents earlier this year in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which reveal a different account for the name.

“I found letters in which Mac suggest-ed to the USDA to name H44 as ‘Faith’,” Kephart wrote in an email to the Capital Journal. “Quite a find.”

In a letter dated Dec. 16, 1929, McFadden wrote to an official in the Bureau of Plant Industry, after being quarantined for scarlet fever. McFadden noted how H44 was a better yielder than H49 under Minnesota conditions.

“Undoubtedly it (H44) is as deserving of a name as its sister strain (Hope). I have jokingly suggested the name of Faith for this wheat on several occa-sions, but did not know that the name was becoming attached to it,” McFadden wrote. “The name is entirely satisfac-tory to me. I might suggest, however, that in case this name is applied to H44, that the name of ‘Charity’ be reserved for some future production having addi-tional virtues. When the time comes to recall Faith and Hope and replace them with a better wheat, it would be a big help to be able to quote from the apostle Paul, and say to the public that of the three wheats, Faith, Hope and Charity, ‘the greatest of these is charity.’ Meanwhile wheat breeders should unite their efforts in working for charity – in more ways than one.”

Although McFadden received a response saying it was premature to name the H44 wheat, he had already been following through with his goal of extending charity to his fellow wheat breeders.

After registering Hope, McFadden began distributing 25-grain packets of it, along with H44, to wheat breed-ers throughout the region, as well as Indiana, Washington and Saskatchewan. He never once charged anyone for the grain.

In subsequent years, McFadden’s Hope would continue to be used throughout the United States, including Texas, where he would later do addi-tional experiments in the 1930s.

Even though Hope offered a solution to stem rust, it was hardly perfect. It was unable to tolerate heat and was threatened by another disease known as black chaff. Nonetheless, it still had the key trait McFadden had been seeking for years.

Following his grain distribution, McFadden used Hope as a parent to cre-ate derivatives, which were even stron-ger.

For as small a role as he played in World War I, McFadden’s influence would loom large in the subsequent war. In fact, Kephart believes that Hope played a significant role in winning World War II.

“The U.S. strengths in World War II were our manufacturing capacity and our capacity to grow food for a two-theater war,” Kephart says. “Wheat was a vital food source for the Allied troops and the nation. We would not have had the capacity if we had to also deal with stem rust during the war years.”

Ibrahim agreed with Kephart’s assess-ment on the impact of Hope wheat. “We know that a single plant, or perhaps, a single seed, saved the whole U.S. wheat industry and likely won the U.S. the World War,” he said.

Between 1939 and 1945, more than 15 million acres of Hope derivatives were planted in the United States and Canada. It played such a vital role that it saved the lives of more than 25 million people and saved American farmers an estimated $400 million, according to a

36-page booklet by A.W. Erickson called “McFadden’s Hope.: Fighting Plant Breeders Win Battle for Bread.” The booklet was published in 1945 and sold for a quarter.

Throughout most of his later years, McFadden lived in Texas. He received significant attention for his greatest achievement, which occurred when he was just 34 years old. Accolades came from all over, including recognition from Reader’s Digest, a distinguished service medal from the USDA and an honorary doctorate of science degree from South Dakota State College.

In 1947, South Dakota Gov. George T. Mickelson dedicated a monument along U.S. Highway 12 in Webster in celebration of the state’s McFadden Appreciation Day.

But McFadden seemed to take all of the recognition with a grain of salt. Even as his health began to fail, McFadden kept working. He seemed uninterested in being recognized for his achievements, which were beyond Hope wheat. He played a sig-nificant role in an effort initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation to make Mexico self-sufficient in wheat. He worked closely with Norman Borlaug, who would later receive a Nobel Peace Prize and become recognized as the father of the “Green Revolution.”

In 1955, McFadden was notified he would be awarded the John Scott Award, which was given to individuals whose inventions had contributed to the comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind. The award would have been McFadden’s most prestigious yet – its recipients included Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and Guglielmo Marconi.

Receiving a letter notifying him of the award, McFadden replied saying that he hoped to decline the award because he had not invented rust resis-tance in wheat. He explained his work with crossbreeding plants. Eventually, after more correspondence with the award committee, McFadden said he would accept it.

The humble man that he was,

McFadden told very few people about the award. It wasn’t until the Associated Press published a story that McFadden’s close friends and neighbors found out.

“His accomplishments were not about him but about the contributions made to society, especially farmers,” Kephart says of McFadden.

Unfortunately McFadden was unable to accept the award in per-son. In November 1955, just a month before his scheduled appearance to accept the John Scott Award in Atlanta, McFadden suffered two heart attacks. Ten days after the celebration in Atlanta, he died in his sleep at his home in College Station, Texas.

Today, nearly a century after his initial experiments began, McFadden’s work continues to resonate. Since his passing, scientists discovered Hope and H44 were resistant to stem rust because of a gene known as Sr2. Kephart says almost all wheat in the Dakotas has the gene in it nowadays.

Many of his unconventional deci-sions and methods are still remem-bered today.

“McFadden was definitely ahead of his time”, said Ibrahim. “He was the first to advocate dividing the wheat area into different regions where breeders use different sources of rust genes, an approach that modern day breeders and pathologists advocate to combat rust.”

Ibrahim said McFadden was either extremely lucky or he had repeated his attempt to crossbreed emmer and Marquis over and over again because he did not have access to chemicals and nutrient media.

Hoping to continue to celebrate McFadden’s work, SDSU will host the Edgar S. McFadden Endowment in Wheat Improvements at the Performing Arts Center on Sept. 23 – 24. It will be the inaugural symposium and will fea-ture members of McFadden’s family and eight speakers, including USDA Under Secretary Catherine Woteki.

The celebration will be an earnest reminder of a man who changed the world with a single seed and a whole lot of faith, hope and charity.

answer the “call to the colors.”

Following the early backyard suc-

McFaddenFrom C1

Throughout most of his later years,

After registering Hope, McFadden

For the next several years, luck would

Top: This photo of Pancho Villa, the man in a black shirt, and his banditos was unearthed from the McFad-den family photo collection. McFadden hid behind rocks to take the photo as his father, James, seen on the right, stands next to the Mexican revolutionaries. (Photo by Edgar McFadden, circa 1910) Bottom left: A portrait of McFadden when he was just 25 years old. Bottom right: Notes taken by McFadden from his crossbreeding experiments in 1917. (Photos courtesy of Kevin Kephart)