The Last Aggie Joke
Texas A&M is going to save the world. No kidding.
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Each of these traits has its particular advantage. For each kind of insect resistance that is built into the plant, there is another kind of pesticide that need not be applied (here environmentalists and agribusinessmen work hand and hand). Greater digestibility means that a ton of grain feeds more cattle—or people. And, for both the human and bovine consumers of sorghum, the high-lysine varieties are an important step forward, because they greatly increase the amount of usable protein in the grain.
The high-lysine sorghum is one of the 16,000-odd varieties housed in the “World Collection” of sorghum in Hyderabad, India. “The excitement these days is the introduction of all those exotics,” said Dr. Miller. “We haven’t begun to touch them yet.” The high-lysine strain turned up in a variety that Ethiopian farmers have deliberately nurtured over the years. “A farmer there would be sure to plant one-seventh of his field in his variety,” says Dr. Miller, “and he would be sure to scatter it all though the other crop, so his neighbor wouldn’t do his harvesting for him. Then they mixed it in with other grains when they ground it, because they seemed to know it was good for them.” The Ethiopian name for this variety, according to Dr. Rooney is translated as “honey that melts in your mouth.”
The problem with this strain, from the American point of view, is that it produces little, shriveled red grains, instead of the plump, bursting globes to which American producers have grown accustomed. (“This shriveled grain will weather severely, which means it is of no practical consequence in temperate zones,” said Dr. Rooney, in one of the interludes when the reporter understood him.) Also, like other tropical varieties, it grows to monstrous proportions if planted directly into Texas soil. To be sure the reporter had not missed this point, Dr. Miller pointed to a bundle of long stalks propped in a far corner of the room, sorghum stalks, apparently, and each twice as tall as a good-sized man. “That’s what happens,” Dr. Miller said. “They’re no good to anybody like that.” The explanation for this phenomenon will now be revealed.
After spending so many millennia in regions near the equator, sorghum has become accustomed to days and nights of roughly constant length, and will flower and produce fruit only when the length is just right.
“In the Northern Hemisphere, days are long during the summer growing season,” Dr. Miller said. “You have to wait until fall, when the days are getting shorter, before the plants will flower. Until then, they just put out vegetation.” By this time, of course, frost is just around the corner, drought may have struck, and the various insect pests have had several months to establish themselves in Texas soil.
Scientists have found two sets of genes responsible for this behavior. One set of four genes controls the plant’s height; another set, whether the plant is early or late in maturity. Most commercial varieties grown in this country have at least one or two “dwarfing” genes, as well as those dictating early maturity. The task is to convert the exotic strains to the same tame status, and that is done through an ingenious cooperative relationship between A&M and experiment stations in Puerto Rico.
When a shipment of promising exotics arrives at College Station, it is shipped off to breeding grounds in Puerto Rico, along with seeds from a squat, early-maturing, domestic line. There, both seeds are planted alongside each other, and both grow until they flower. (Puerto Rico being in the tropics, the Ethiopian varieties feel right at home.) Then the two strains are cross-fertilized, and the seeds from that cross make up a hybrid F1 generation. Students of Mendel’s law will recall that these F1 seeds will produce identical-looking plants, all displaying dominant traits. When the F1 generation fertilizes itself, the seeds from that union are the F2 generation. Students will also recall that plants grown from these F2 seeds will not be identical, since some recessive traits will have a chance to emerge. As soon as the seeds for the F2 generation are ready, they are sent back to Chillicothe, Texas, and planted in thousands of test plots. About 95 per cent of the plants that grow from this generation will be tall and leafy—but a few will be short.
These shorter, earlier plants are carefully observed and selected, and their seeds are sent back to Puerto Rico to begin the cycle all over again. On this second go-round, the selected seeds from Texas are planted next to another set of the pure exotics. Both are grown out, crossed for an F1, self-pollinated for an F2, and sent back to Texas.
This cycle goes on five times; on each successive round, the short, early plant which is grown alongside the pure exotic in Puerto Rico has a little greater proportion of the exotic’s genetic traits. By the time the five cycles are over, the breeders have a plant virtually identical to the one they brought in from Africa—except that it is short and early, and ready to take its place among the crusaders against famine.
There is more to be said about sorghum—about, for instance, the electron microscope with which Don Sullins peers deep into the mysteries of branched starch structures and globular lysine concentrations—but there is not room to say it here. Those interested in pursuing further work in the field, and possessing suitable College Board scores, should contact the Admissions Office, Texas A&M, College Station 77840.
Them Old Cotton Fields
The reporter was no slouch. He had read a book. It was put out by the National Academy of Sciences, and it made him start worrying again about where he was going to find things to eat in his old age. The point of the report was that there are no more Green Revolutions on the horizon. Farm yields would still go up, but not in any impressively bountiful way. “No foreseeable quantum increases in yield,” was the official way of putting it.
“I hear there are no foreseeable quantum increases in yield,” the reporter asked Dudley Smith, hoping he sounded natural. “What about that, huh?”
Smith turned around, eyes wide. The reporter speculated that if Smith ever lost his job at A&M, he could earn a living as a movie double for Alan Arkin. Smith recovered his composure and said, “Let’s find out.”
In the ensuing tour, the reporter was introduced to Dr. Leonard Pike and his “two-story onions” (Smith’s phrase), hypothetical crops, to be shaped like soup cans, which produce far more onions-per-acre than standard varieties. Dr. Pike also had several varieties of path-breaking cucumbers curling about his greenhouse, many of which had the potential to greatly increase yield. They included a “hermaphroditic” model, strangely puffy and globular in shape. The reporter knew the parallel was inexact, but every time he looked at those cucumbers he could not help thinking of fleshy eunuchs in a Persian harem tent.
The tour was eventually to include mass-reproduction experiments with cattle and new techniques for quantum increases in forest yields. Closest to realization, however, and where the reader’s own tour will end, is the cotton breeding work discussed by Dr. George (“Alva”) Niles.
There are few crops these days with a less savory reputation than cotton. Unlike those wholesome staples, wheat, corn, and rice, cotton too easily calls to mind Ole Massa in his linen suit, and, crop dusters unloading tons of poison on unsuspecting sharecroppers below. Public relations is a serious problem for the cotton lobby in Washington, for self-respecting Northern politicians, even with their new-found enthusiasm for the “farm problem,” cannot easily bring themselves to support the modern inheritors of Simon Legree.
If the cotton industry knew what was good for it, it would send Alva Niles and his color-slide projector on a nation-wide tour. His story tells how cotton, symbol of the worst of high-technology agriculture, may soon represent the best.
Dr. Niles is a sunburned man with hair cut in the early Parris Island manner; on the day of the presentation he was wearing a bright yellow shirt with a turquoise-studded bolo tie. After the visitors were comfortably seated in the dark, he began flashing slides that might have been taken of the grounds around Tara: tall, waving cotton plants at the end of the season, fluffs of white among the darkened foliage—all that was missing was the crew of singing cotton-pickers, backs stooped in the sun.
“This is your standard Delta variety of cotton,” Dr. Niles said. “It has a long growing season, and of course many pests. Insect control for this cotton is very costly. There is the cost of the chemicals, the cost of the application, the environmental limits, the health hazards. And the insects are becoming immune.”
Suddenly the slide changed. On the screen were pitiful little wooden twigs, perhaps a foot high, densely covered with white cotton bolls. The overall impression was of a collage of Q-tips.
“One of the ways we are trying to increase yield is with ‘short-season’ varieties. These dwarf plants grow and set their bolls in a very short time, about 130 days instead of the 180-190 for standard varieties.” The virtues of this quick growth are several, he continued. “This variety has a shorter exposure to inclement weather and insect pests. They need less water and less fertilizer. They can be harvested more cheaply.” Dr. Niles was reluctant to say just how much the dwarf plants might save the cotton grower, but suggested that they might reduce the overall cost of operation by several dozen percentage points.
From this point on, the slide show became more engrossingly bizarre. “Pilose” cotton appeared on the screen, with a superfluity of tiny hairs, followed by its “glabrous” counterpart, whose smooth, hairless stems were utterly exposed. Dr. Niles displayed the “fregobract” leaf structure, and varieties of “nectarless” cotton. The point of these variations was to protect the crop against the Four Horsemen of the cotton growers’ apocalypse: boll weevil, boll worm, bud worm, and fleahopper. Not all of the features can be incorporated in the same plant, and in some cases they have contradictory effects. Pilose cotton, for instance, has greater resistance to the fleahopper, but makes the plants more vulnerable to boll worm and budworm. The most effective weapon against the boll weevil seems to be short-season variety, which has most of its crop made and ready for harvest by the time the weevils become a serious threat. All this means that the growers must decide which pests pose the greatest menace in their area, and choose a breed accordingly. Dr. Niles showed pictures of fields where the new breeds had been adopted, with significant effects on yields.
Perhaps more significant was their effect on pesticide consumption; for, after decades of applying steadily larger quantities of pesticide in an effort to kill the bugs, the growers now have a way of breeding in resistance, of growing cotton without poisoning half the wildlife in the United States.
“Does that make you feel better?” Dudley Smith asked when the show was over. The reporter admitted that it did.
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