PREFACE

ALFRED STEFFERUD

Editor of the Yearbook

JOHN CHAPMAN is in this book. He was the near-legendary Johnny Appleseed, who for almost fifty of his seventy-odd years planted apple trees through the pioneer wilderness. The seeds he got from cider presses in Pennsylvania he carried in canoes down the Ohio River and on his back to clearings in Ohio and Indiana. He walked hundreds of miles to tend his orchards and share his dream and the good health he believed was in apples and herbs. He was an original, a doer; he gave no speeches, wrote no books, attended no committee meetings. To the settlers he was a kindly, helpful visitor, who now and then asked a few pennies or old clothes for his efforts. To the Indians he was a welcome medicine man, to whom service was a privilege. To us he is a lesson in greatness, for he who plants a seed plants life.

Wendelin Grimm also is in this book. In 1857, when he was nearly forty years old, he emigrated from his home in Baden, Germany, to Carver County in Minnesota. He brought with him as a prized possession a few pounds of alfalfa seeds, which he planted on some of the 137 acres he bought near Chaska. In the cold Minnesota winter, the first year and later years, some plants winterkilled. Sometimes nearly all died. Each year Grimm saved and planted seeds of the plants that survived. His cattle thrived on the alfalfa, which in time became acclimatized and winterkilled no longer. He let neighbors have some of the seeds. It did not occur to him that his work had scientific importance—he was just being a good farmer—but the value of his "everlasting clover" came to be recognized. Modest, hardworking Wendelin Grimm surely expected no monument, but he has two: A bronze tablet, unveiled in 1924, on a boulder on his old farm and the crop that is grown and prized as Grimm alfalfa. An editorial George W. Kelley wrote about him in the Northwest Farmstead said in part : "The world knows not its greatest benefactors. . . . Sometimes, though, it is given to a few to recognize and pay tribute to a patient man or woman who in obscurity and perhaps in poverty has worked out great benefits to humanity. . . ."

Gregor Johann Mendel, too, is here. He was the gentle, unknown, incurably curious Austrian monk who kept on planting peas in a monastery garden, checking the traits of each generation, and wondering about the reasons for the differences. His report on his records was the beginning of much of our knowledge of heredity and genetics. The horizon of knowledge he pointed to is a limitless one.

Here also are men and women who stand alongside Johnny Apple-seed, Wendelin Grimm, and Gregor Johann Mendel in dedication, accomplishment, and vision.

They are the scores of scientists whose work is explained and made into tools for the hands of all. Their efforts helped to make available seeds of superior varieties that have made it possible for Americans to enjoy a bountiful and continuing food supply and to share their good fortune with other people.

They are also the research scientists, plant breeders, seedsmen, economists, production specialists, seedgrowers, and administrators who, drawing on the knowledge of centuries and the notable developments of recent years, have written these chapters. They have written for technicians, because in a day of specialization there is much to be shared and explored; for farmers and gardeners and foresters and others who work in the fields of applied biology; for students and pupils, who some day will discover new things because, despite our big strides forward, there is still much room for improvement; and for the rest of us, who are incurably curious about life and living things. Their subject is as broad as life itself, for seed or seeds (words that we use interchangeably in this book without any special distinction) are life.