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Wheat: King of the Northern Plains What do you plan on doing in the future, Per Hansa, if you're going to get rich on the the very first crop? ... I never in my life saw such wheat! Why, the kernels are like potatoes!
The late 19th century was an era in which wheat became king of the Northern Plains. As of 1880, wheat acreage in counties bordering the Red River of the North likely totaled less than 250,000; by 1900 that figure had swollen to nearly 3.3 million. Oceans of golden grain flowed annually from the Red River Valley and beyond toward the flour mills of Minneapolis and Port of Duluth-Superior. On a tri-state basis, as of 1990, a whopping 652 million bushels of hard red spring, durum and hard red winter wheat came off Dakota-Minnesota fields. Since the wheat acreage climb had largely leveled off by around World War I, what has accounted for the burgeoning production of recent decades? Answer: progressively higher yields. More intensive crop management (e.g., the use of fertilizers) certainly is part of that equation. But even more significant has been the development of new generations of improved wheat varieties by state university experiment stations. These varieties brought not only improved yield and quality characteristics, but also crucial resistance to major diseases such as stem rust. Of course, as with most things in agriculture, improved on-farm yields have not occurred in a consistently upward trend. Good weather years have been followed by mediocre or poor ones. One disease strain has been overcome only to be followed by another. And the cycles of nature have been matched by the marketplace, with its own ups and downs. |
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| Within the past five
years, wheat production on the Northern Plains has faced a major new challenge, one that
appropriately takes the form of a four-letter word: scab. Officially Fusarium head blight,
scab can affect all classes of wheat, and other small grains such as barley. It's a fungal
disease that at severe infestation levels can virtually destroy an otherwise promising
field. Along with slashing yield, it results in discolored and shriveled kernels,
mycotoxin contamination and reductions in seed quality. Scab first reared its ugly head in a big way in 1993. To one degree or another, it has been a problem every year since - including the recently harvested 1997 Dakota-Minnesota wheat and barley crops. A recent estimate by ag economists at North Dakota State University places 1997 direct losses to this state's spring wheat, durum and barley producers at about $355 million. Total loss to the state, when adding in the indirect results on communities, is projected at $1.1 billion. North Dakota's overall losses to scab since 1993 are estimated at $2.9 billion. Tack on losses in neighboring states, along with the ripple effect throughout the grain industry, and it's readily apparent why this disease is now receiving a tremendous amount of attention. USDA geneticist Dr. Robert Busch, who heads spring wheat breeding efforts in Minnesota, says the development of scab-tolerant or -resistant varieties is crucial to the future of this region's wheat industry. USDA-ARS and the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station have already released one variety - "BacUp" - which displays good tolerance to scab. It has high protein content but ranks low to medium in yield capacity compared to other varieties on today's market. It also is moderately susceptible to the foliar disease complex and to lodging. BacUp's mixture of strengths and weaknesses reflects a basic challenge facing plant breeders: how to incorporate a new and highly desirable trait (e.g. disease resistance) into a variety without compromising too much on other important traits (e.g. yield potential, maturity, quality). Dr. Richard Frohberg, spring wheat breeder at NDSU, says that's one reason why the percent improvement in wheat yields during recent years has not been as high as that of other crops, like corn and soybeans. He refers to a variety like BacUp as a "transition variety," meaning it will perform better than a non-scab-tolerant variety when the disease is present; but may not do as well as most other varieties under non-disease conditions. The ongoing challenge is to produce varieties with the best of both worlds. Dr. Frohberg believes that today's wheat varieties generally have the genetic potential to produce 25 to 30 percent more yield than the varieties grown 20 years ago. Achieving as much of that potential as possible requires proper management by growers. But growers can't do it alone, as this decade's scab problem has clearly shown. Breeders and geneticists play a vital role in the viability equation. The answers they discover and the advancements they make will be major determinants of wheat's future on the Northern Plains. This article was written by Don Lilleboe, an ag writer who lives in West Fargo, N.D. For more on the challenges facing wheat, and new promise for wheat, see the next page.
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he 19th century
Norwegian immigrant farmer who proclaimed these words in O.E. Rolvaag's epic novel
"Giants in the Earth" certainly had visions of a bright future on the fresh
Dakota prairie. But neither he nor neighbor Per Hansa could have envisioned the vast
amount of wheat that eventually would be grown across this region's landscape.
