The Greatest Service to Any Country

MARGUERITE GILSTRAP.

OUR MAIN crops came from all parts of the world. None of them originated in the United States. Indians, colonists, traders, immigrants, Government people, and plant hunters in turn have brought them.

Those who first imported seeds and plants sought crops that were known to be the best in the regions where they grew.

The goal has changed since then to a search for germ plasm, the substance of life by which hereditary traits are transmitted, because our widening knowledge of genetics has shown that the wild relatives of crop plants are also a rich source of improvement.

Crop breeders today use huge collections of seeds of cultivated plants and related wild species to select germ plasm for improved varieties of crops grown here and to find new crops.

The task of assembling and maintaining plant genes from the whole world has become a far-ranging, continuing, and highly productive activity of the Department of Agriculture, an activity shared by every State where plant breeders seek new frontiers.

Our crops were domesticated in many parts of the world. Corn, potatoes, and tomatoes grew in the Andes of Bolivia and Peru. Wheat, rye, and lentils along the Euphrates Basin of the Near East. Soybeans in China. Rice in southeastern India. Citrus fruit in Burma. Peas in Middle Asia, the Near East, and Ethiopia. Cherries, apples, and certain plums in the Caucasian Mountains of the Near East. Oats in northern Europe.

Their introduction to what is now the United States began with the Indians of ancient America. We do not know precisely when the crops native to Central and South America were moved northward and dispersed.

The oldest remains of cultivated corn are those found in the refuse in Bat Cave in New Mexico. They are more than 5 thousand years old. They came from plants that have disappeared from the earth, from species more akin to popcorn and pod corn than the field corns of today. The wild plants looked more like grasses. They had many short stalks, bore the ear high on the stalk, and had brittle branches, which broke easily and allowed the seeds to fall to the ground.

The great turning point in Indian culture when seeds formerly collected for food were first saved for planting probably occurred more than 7 thousand years ago.

Colonists from Europe found North American Indians growing corn, often with beans and squash, from the eastern seaboard to the foot of the Rocky Mountains and up the Missouri River to Montana. Some plantings covered hundreds of acres.

Columbus began the introduction of Old World crops in 1493. He carried barley, wheat, sugarcane, and grapes on his second voyage west.

The colonists who followed the Spanish armies into Florida, Mexico, and Peru took with them seeds of those and other crops they knew. They, like the immigrants through the years, settled in places that reminded them of the homes they left. Many crops brought from Spain therefore did well in the new environment.

They needed more seeds and more. The Spanish Government consequently ordered all ships sailing for the Indies to carry plants and seeds in the cargo. Among the 147 species and varieties of introductions to New Spain cataloged from early histories are alfalfa, flax, oats, apricots, lemons, olives, oranges, peaches, pears, walnuts, cabbage, lettuce, peas, spinach, turnips, anise, fennel, mustard, saffron, thyme, bamboo, carnations, daffodils, iris, and poppies.

The Indians distributed some of them. The wild peaches found by the first settlers in Pennsylvania, for instance, very likely came from Spanish plantings a century earlier in St. Augustine, Fla.

The Spaniards likewise adopted crops of the Indians corn, white potatoes, tobacco, cotton, avocado, kidney, and lima beans, cacao, the chili pepper, gourd, guava, cassava, mate, pineapple, pricklypear, pumpkin, quinoa, squash, sweetpotato, and tomato.

The first introduction from Spanish America, Orinoco tobacco, was brought by Jamestown planters from Trinidad in 1611. It became the source of colonial Virginia's most profitable crop.

Most of the food and feed crops now grown in the United States were established in colonial America by the end of the 17th century.

The ideas that were to govern the introduction of plants during the next two centuries were current then, as well the belief that agriculture everywhere could be improved by the adoption of new methods; that the colonies could grow all the cash crops then in demand in Europe, among them rice, indigo, cotton, sugar, spices, tea, grapes for wine, and mulberry trees for silkworms; that new crops could be adapted if planting materials were brought from many different sources and grown experimentally; and that plants of all kinds should be collected for study and classification.

The colonists failed again and again in their efforts to establish the crops so urgently wanted on the European market. Few of the plants introduced repeatedly from the subtropics survived the winters of even the southernmost Colonies.

But finally, in the 1690's, South Carolina planters found in seeds from Madagascar the hardy productive rice that could be grown on their lowlands. And in 1745, Eliza Lucas, then only 18, introduced the indigo seeds that gained a foothold for this highly prized crop. They came from Antigua, West Indies, where her father was governor and she had formerly lived.

To tobacco, rice, and indigo, planters of the Southern Coastal Plains added a fourth profitable crop shortly after the American Revolution.

This was sea-island cotton, the seeds of which were introduced from the Bahamas. Its advantage over upland cotton, which had been introduced by the Indians, was that the lint separated easily from the seeds. The cotton gin, patented by Eli Whitney in 1793, however, overcame this difficulty for upland cotton and soon paved the way for the expansion of the crop.

Plant introduction during the 18th century reflected the keen interest in experimentation then beginning to rise in the Western World.

An example is the colonists who left England for Georgia in 1735. Even before they left, they set aside 10 acres for an experimental garden. They hired a competent botanist to explore for "useful Plants ... found wanting in America." Neither the botanist first engaged nor the one who was hired to succeed him introduced any seeds or plants they did not even reach Georgia. But the men in charge of the Trustees' Garden in Savannah proved to their own satisfaction that the climate was too severe for the subtropical plants under study. They turned the plot into a nursery for grapevines and mulberry trees. Fifteen years after the garden was laid out, they decided to abandon the enterprise, but it had served a purpose.

Many of the fruits and ornamentals imported during the 18th century were first grown in the gardens of able plantsmen such as George Robbins of Easton, Md., Henry Laurens and Charles Drayton of Charleston, S.C., and John Bartram of Philadelphia.

Bartram, a farmer who taught himself botany, was considered by the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus to be "the greatest natural botanist in the world." His botanical garden near Philadelphia, the best known in colonial America, specialized in the plants of this continent. It was also the point of introduction for many different kinds of seeds sent to him by Benjamin Franklin and other Americans traveling abroad and by the directors of the botanical gardens in Europe.

Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were among the leading citizens of colonial America whose interest in plant introduction was no less practical than it was scientific.

On missions abroad they carried on a brisk exchange of seeds with growers at home. Franklin introduced two Scottish crops to America rhubarb and kale.

Jefferson risked the death penalty in northern Italy to obtain seeds of an upland rice for South Carolina. The provincial government, seeking to protect its monopoly, prohibited the export of seed. Jefferson smuggled them out in his coat.

Franklin and Jefferson, like other influential men of their times, had studied the work of Linnaeus and other botanical authorities. They were well acquainted with the directors of botanical gardens of Europe and exchanged seeds and other plant material with them. Before members of agricultural and scientific societies then being organized on both sides of the Atlantic, they discussed their observations of plantlife.

With the founding of the Republic, the societies became powerful forces in plant introduction. Their members were wealthy men who could afford to try new methods and make mistakes. They believed the success of agriculture depended on the diversification of crops and the cultivation of new and unusual ones.

A fluent spokesman for these ideas was Elkanah Watson, one of the founders of the New York Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts and the Berkshire Agricultural Society in Massachusetts.

Watson in 1817 sent a circular letter requesting seeds from the consuls in Europe. An enthusiastic response came from Valencia, Spain. There, at Watson's suggestion, the consul turned to an eminent Spanish botanist for help in selecting varieties of grain that should do well in this country. The seeds of 14 kinds of wheat, one of oats, and one of barley were sealed in a cask and sent to Watson.

Farmers in a Shaker community near Albany, N.Y., were among those who grew the wheat and reported with favor on one variety. The results so impressed James Madison, then president of the Virginia Agricultural Society, that he mentioned them in an address to the society. The address was published in the American Farmer, a new and influential journal.

Government officials perceived the importance of Watson's work.

William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, in 1819 issued a circular to consuls and naval officers asking them to send useful plants and seeds to collectors at American ports. The Congress appropriated no funds for the work, but the Agricultural Society of South Carolina allotted 200 dollars a year, beginning in 1823, to pay naval officers for the costs of correspondence.