The Early History of Wheat Improvement in the Great Plains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than 60% of U.S. wheat is grown in the Great Plains. Three classes of common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)—hard red spring, hard red winter, and hard white—and durum (T. turgidum L. var. durum) occupy 16 million ha in the region and provide most of the U.S. grain for baked goods and pasta. This article relates the early history of the four classes and the key persons involved in their establishment. Pioneers faced many difficulties in settling the Plains, but the need for adapted cultivars was paramount. Three cultivars—‘Red Fife’ hard red spring wheat, ‘Turkey’‐type hard red winter wheat, and ‘Kubanka’ durum wheat—were the foundation for the industry. Red Fife was selected by D.A. Fife of Ontario in 1842. The cultivar spread to the northern U.S. Plains during the 1860s and dominated production for 40 yr. Turkey hard red winter wheat was introduced to Kansas by Mennonite settlers from the Ukraine, particularly B. Warkentin, in 1873 and was advanced by C.C. Georgeson, who recognized its potential. Another cultivar, ‘Kharkof’, introduced by M.A. Carleton in 1900, stimulated spread of the class throughout the Plains. Carleton also introduced Kubanka in 1900 and promoted its utilization to start the U.S. durum industry. The most recent class, hard white wheat, was initiated by E.G. Heyne and approved by the USDA in 1990. These wheats transformed American agriculture by opening a vast area for production, shifting the center of cultivation to the Plains, and changing the country into a major grain exporter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".