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About Edgar S. McFadden

From a Single Seed

A century ago as today, the world relied on South Dakota and the northern Great Plains to grow the best quality wheat. A single disease, black stem rust, was carried by the winds and threatened wheat crops from Mexico to the Canadian prairies. Stem rust infestations caused lost farm income, declined rural communities, and hunger. As a student at South Dakota State in 1916, Edgar McFadden envisioned and accomplished the first major breakthrough in conferring genetic resistance to stem rust. From a single seed, his work is still making a critical difference today, feeding billions of people.

Edgar S. McFadden (1891 – 1956) was a remarkable scientist who made breakthroughs in wheat genetics in South Dakota and in Texas. McFadden (widely known as “Mac”) was born and raised on a homestead in Day County, South Dakota. Stem rust was the most threatening disease of wheat and caused as much as 70% crop loss.

Mcfadden in a wheat field

By 1913 he was conducting an aggressive breeding program in wheat, oats, corn and barley and by the age of 34, he accomplished what became the centerpiece of his career. From a single seed he developed a spring wheat variety that was immune to stem rust. Aptly, he named it ‘Hope’. Hope wheat was the first successful mating between common wheat and an ancestral wheat species, an accomplishment that most scientists of the time believed was impossible. This accomplishment set the stage for greater wheat production during World War II, the recovery years afterward, and the Green Revolution. After graduating in 1918 from South Dakota State with a B.S. degree in Agriculture, McFadden began a career with the USDA Bureau of Plant Industry and later became an enabling colleague with Norman Borlaug during the Rockefeller Foundation wheat improvement program in Mexico from 1944 to 1955.

In order to recognize the important contribution of Edgar McFadden and to continue his legacy, South Dakota State University has established the Edgar S. McFadden Endowment for Wheat Improvement to continue research on new varieties and other technologies that serve wheat producers.

Edgar S. McFadden Call for Public Art

Edgar S. McFadden (1891–1956) was a remarkable scientist who made breakthroughs in wheat genetics in South Dakota and Texas. He was born to Mr. and Mrs. James E. McFadden in a shanty during a blizzard in the Coteau Hills near Webster, South Dakota on February 3, 1891. His cradle was a grain bin filled with seed wheat; a fitting bed for an individual who would later feed the world with his insight and tenacity as a radical wheat breeder and contributor to the Green Revolution[1] that fed the world during a time of crisis.

McFadden’s life story is a saga of mankind’s battle for food[2].

A century ago, stem rust (a.k.a. cereal rust, red rust, red dust, black rust) was the most threatening disease of wheat and caused as much as 70 percent crop loss. This disease is caused by a fungus which infects the leaf and stem tissue. As the disease progresses, infected plants produce fewer tillers and set fewer seed; plants may die from severe infections. Infection can reduce what is an apparently healthy crop shortly before harvest and turn it into a black tangle of broken stems and shriveled grains by the time of harvest. Historically, stem rust infections throughout the world caused lost farm income, devastated entire rural communities, and increased hunger. 

McFadden, as a mere teenager and young adult, recognized and experienced the devastation this disease could cause and could have on the food security of the nation and the world. He witnessed red spores rain down on a healthy wheat crop and then watched the fungus suck the life from the plant in a mere three weeks just prior to harvest. With this insight, he envisioned a better future for wheat production and dedicated his life to finding a solution to the devastating crop losses that plagued farm families across the nation.

At the age of 20, his commitment to a new future in wheat production took him to South Dakota State College, now South Dakota State University, in 1911 where he enrolled in the School of Agriculture, became a student assistant, and conducted research on wheat, barley, and other small grain crops under the direction of Manley Champlin. By 1913, he was conducting an aggressive breeding program in wheat, oats, corn, and barley. He conducted research at Brookings, Highmore, Webster, and other locations across South Dakota during his time at the university.

He graduated with a B.S. degree in Agriculture from South Dakota State College in 1918; he received an honorary doctorate from his alma matter in 1950.

After graduation in 1918, McFadden began a career with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Plant Industry. He also worked for a period at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul campus.

By the age of 34, McFadden accomplished what became the centerpiece of his career. From a single seed he developed a spring wheat variety that was resistant to both stem and leaf rusts. Aptly, he named it ‘Hope’. ‘Hope’ wheat was the first successful mating between common wheat and an ancestral wheat species, an accomplishment that most scientists of the time believed was impossible. This accomplishment set the stage for greater wheat production during World War II, the recovery years afterward, and the Green Revolution.

McFadden’s ‘Hope’ is credited for saving American farmers $400 million and added hundreds of millions of bushels of wheat to stockpiles during the years of World War II. Harold Card reported in the October 7, 1947, issue of the Reporter and Farmer that “The food shortages during the war were bad enough but without McFadden’s work, it would have been desperate. No one can compute in dollars and in lives saved or human suffering avoided, the value of McFadden’s research gave a hungry world a variety of wheat which was resistant to the rust plague which so many times has swept over the country, leaving crushed hopes, empty cupboards and bankrupt farmers in its wake.

‘Hope’ may have provided wheat with resistance to stem rust but, McFadden’s cultivars yielded poorly. He knew he had to select cultivars that were high yielding as well as resistant to stem rust. McFadden unselfishly distributed seed of ‘Hope’ to plant breeders across the nation to be crossed with other wheat cultivars.

In 1935, McFadden joined the USDA as an Assistant Agronomist at College Station, Texas. Upon arrival he found that Paul C. Mangelsdorf had used Hope in his breeding program and had crossed it with Mediterranean lines of winter wheat. Seabreeze was developed from a cross between a selection from Mediterranean-Hope and Gasta made in 1938. It was distributed in Texas in the fall of 1945 and the estimated area in 1949 was 6,750 acres, grown in southern Texas[3].

Over 100 varieties with Hope in their pedigrees have been released to date.

McFadden may have been the most innovative plant breeder from 1913 to 1956. He created important wheat varieties including Acme, Webster, Hope, H44, Austin, Seabreeze, Westar, Supremo, Frontera, Milan, Travis, and Bowie. He also created Ranger, Rustler, and Verda oat varieties.

Another pioneer of rust-resistant and semi-dwarf wheat, Norman Borlaug, was born March 25, 1914, on a farm in Iowa. Borlaug received his schooling at the University of Minnesota, and he spent most of his life breeding rust-resistant and semi-dwarf wheat varieties. In the 1940s Borlaug began conducting research in Mexico and developed new disease resistant high-yielding varieties of wheat. By combining Borlaug’s wheat varieties with new mechanized agricultural technologies, irrigation technologies, and greater use of fertilizers, Mexico was able to produce more wheat than was needed by its own citizens enabling them to become an exporter of wheat in the 1960s. Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation by helping people across the world increase their wheat production. For his actions, Norman Borlaug is credited as the father of the Green Revolution.

To increase Green Revolution technologies and practices to produce more food for a growing global population, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, as well as many government agencies around the world funded massive amounts of research in Mexico and India.

Norman Borlaug built upon the work of McFadden. Using McFadden’s ‘Hope’ and other derivatives, Borlaug produced high yielding, disease resistant varieties that were well-adapted to the harsh Mexico environment. McFadden and Borlaug were likely not strangers during this period of their careers. While McFadden was working in plant breeding on the St. Paul, Minnesota campus, Borlaug was studying forestry. As fate would have it, both McFadden and Borlaug went on to collaborate on the Rockefeller Foundation’s wheat improvement program in Mexico from 1944 to 1955. Borlaug later stated that McFadden “. . . had a great impact on my work and a profound effect on what I’ve been able to do in the past 30 years[4].

In addition to developing varieties, McFadden played a vital role in understanding the evolution of wheat and identified its progenitor species like Aegilops tauschii (syn Ae. squarrosa, Triticum tauschii) which provides the D genome of hexaploid wheat[5]. Further, he was the first to develop synthetic wheat (recreated the wheat by crossing two progenitors), the technique later used by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and other institutions to introgress hundreds of useful genes from Ae. tauschii in bread wheat. He was one of the founding fathers of wheat wide-hybridization along with Kihara and Sears.

Edgar S. McFadden died in his sleep at his home in College Station, TX where he rests today.

 

[1] The term Green Revolution refers to the renovation of agricultural practices beginning in Mexico in the 1940s that improved grain yield and plant health.

[2] Source unknown.

[3]  Bayles and Clark, 1949

[4] Source??????

[5] McFadden and Sears 1944,1946