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PROFILE: Orville A. Vogel

Orville A. Vogel: Wheat breeder helped found Green Revolution and invented scientific research equipment used worldwide.

Copyright © 2005 by E. A. Kral

An international leader in researching wheat improvement in the 20th century was award-winning agronomist Orville A. Vogel, a native of Pilger, Nebraska.

Unknown outside his field, he was credited with revolutionizing wheat production, and with helping to provide the foundation on which was based the Green Revolution of the 1960s and beyond.

Some agriculture authorities also asserted that Vogel's inventions in scientific research equipment indirectly contributed to expansion of world food production as much or perhaps more than his wheat breeding did.

"Wheat is the world's most important food crop," according to World Book Encyclopedia, Vol 21 (2005). Each year, the farmers of the world grow about 20 billion bushels, an amount that could fill "a freight train stretching around the world about 2 1/2 times."

About 70 percent of the grain is grown for human consumption, typically in bread and other baked products, breakfast food, and pasta. About 10 percent is used for seed. The remainder is processed for industrial products such as adhesives, fuel, and synthetic rubber, and for livestock feed.

First cultivated in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago, wheat was brought from Europe to America in 1493 by explorer Christopher Columbus. In the 1870s, the Mennonites, who had immigrated from Russia to Kansas, brought Turkey Red winter wheat, a variety suited to Great Plains climate.

In the 19th century, expansion of wheat production was aided by the development of machinery, though prior to 1900, farm equipment was animal-drawn. During the 1920s, internal combustion engines in tractors and other farm machines, such as combines (a combination harvester and thresher), helped make production more efficient.

At about the same time in the 20th century, scientific wheat breeding began, causing some of the most important advances in wheat history. Among the results were higher yield per acre, resistance to diseases, and adaptability to climate changes. To date, more than 40,000 varieties of wheat have been produced in the world.

In 1931, Orville Vogel began his 42-year career as a U.S. Department of Agriculture wheat breeder stationed at Washington State University at Pullman, where he earned his doctorate degree in agronomy in 1939. His early experience in breeding for resistance to smut made him a pioneer in recognizing the importance of biological control of plant diseases.

After he observed in the 1940s that varieties slightly infected with a type of smut called bunt were less vulnerable to attack by different types of the smut fungus, he developed by 1949 the Brevor variety by selecting partially smutted plants, giving it both specific and non-specific forms of resistance. This minimized the threat of bunt in the Pacific Northwest, where it once threatened the entire wheat industry.

Vogel also realized the need for shorter and more lodging-resistant winter wheats after farmers began planting them early and applying higher amounts of nitrogen fertilizers. He reported that under these circumstances, his newly developed Brevor, which offered higher yields, was accompanied with severely lodged grain (the stalks fell over), causing harvest to be difficult and wheat to be lost.

After 1949, in an effort to solve the lodging problem caused by long stalks, he began to experiment with a collection of semidwarf (short stalk) wheats. According to the January-February 1970 Agronomy Journal, "his early exceptional selections from merging the germ plasm of the short Japanese wheat Norin 10 with that of Brevor have provided the basic germ plasm for worldwide advances with semidwarf wheats."

For more than a decade, through painstaking efforts and good luck in selecting and mating parents, Vogel and his research team had developed the Western Hemisphere's first commercially successful semidwarf wheat. Called Gaines, a soft white strain released in 1961, it produced high yields without the stalk's falling over from the weight of the grain. It became the dominant variety with yields above 100 bushels per acre on both dryland and irrigated farming. In fact, Gaines held the world commercial field record of 209 bushels per acre.

However, the widespread farming practice of early planting of winter wheat brought the need for developing varieties resistant to stripe rust. His Nugaines variety, the sister selection of Gaines, was released in 1965, and had durable resistance to this disease. This form of resistance has remained effective for over 40 years.

As a special consultant in the 1960s, he studied the Australian wheat industry, advised the nation of Turkey regarding programs to hasten agricultural development, traveled to Mexico and Canada to advise on selections for Northern latitudes, and visited Japan and New Zealand to assess the progress in breeding new varieties.

Vogel's greatest impact internationally, however, had come as a result of introducing the Japanese dwarfing gene into wheat shortly after World War II that not only resulted in substantial grain yield increase but also laid the foundation for what later became known as the Green Revolution in developing foreign countries after the mid-1960s.

In 1953, he had sent seed of some of his Norin 10-Brevor semidwarf lines to plant pathologist and geneticist Norman Borlaug, an Iowa native who was working with Mexican agricultural scientists to increase wheat yields in that nation, which had reached a plateau because too much use of fertilizers made the plants grow too tall, causing lodging.

After Borlaug and his assistants created a hybrid strain over several years of crossing their improved Mexican wheat with Vogel's semidwarf lines, a grain suitable for Mexico with yields twice as high as the earlier strain was produced. It was also widely adopted in India in the mid-1960s, and further technology improvements there were extended to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, and elsewhere.

Scientists in the Philippines developed semidwarf rice strains patterned after the Mexican dwarf wheat varieties, and the Green Revolution spread to Southeast Asia, reported Borlaug's entry in Notable Twentieth Century Scientists, Vol 1 (1995). It is of historical interest that agronomist and Nebraska native Henry M. Beachell was the 1969 recipient of the John Scott Award granted by the City of Philadelphia for "his invention of tropical dwarf rice IR 8 at Laguna, Philippines."

In 1973, on the occasion of Orville Vogel's retirement, Borlaug, who had three years earlier received the Nobel Peace Prize as "father" of the Green Revolution, confirmed the success of his Mexican research team after Vogel shared his genetic material, and noted the Nebraska native's contribution to world wheat research "changed our entire concept of wheat yield potentials."

Moreover, in the article "Milestones in ARS Research" published in the November-December 1983 issue of Agricultural Research, it was noted that Vogel's crossing of the Japanese wheat Norin 10 with Brevor was one of the significant factors in the Green Revolution, a term that actually means productivity improvement.

At the turn of the 21st century, the leading wheat-growing nations, in rank order, are China, India, the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, and Pakistan.

Concurrent with Vogel's wheat breeding accomplishments was his invention of research plot equipment. Over a period of 45 years he designed and built the miniature equipment as a hobby to automate planting and harvesting of large plant populations in research and breeding, which at present has contributed to the research of many people at experiment stations in more than 50 nations. In 1973, Norman Borlaug publicly stated, "Perhaps these inventions have contributed indirectly to expanding world food production even more than did the varieties he developed, which in themselves revolutionized wheat production."

According to papers housed at the Washington State University Libraries, Vogel designed and built more than a dozen specialized kinds of equipment. In 1932, he developed a combination one-row or three-row seeder, which he replaced in 1959 with a perfected semi-automatic eight-row seeder. Designed to permit rapid uniform planting of plots in adverse soil and weather conditions, it allows three men to seed 5,000 eight-foot plots per hour.

His most famous machine was the "Vogel nursery plot thresher," used around the world by wheat, oat, barley, rice, rye, flax, pea, bean and oilseed breeders. The first eight-foot cut, self-propelled plot combine, which can be self-cleaned within ten seconds, was developed in 1969.

He published articles for a journal of the American Society of Agronomy, presented papers by invitation at several conferences in Australia, Europe, and the United States, and held regional and national leadership positions for various societies and organizations.

Indicative of Vogel's high achievement was the prestigious National Medal of Science for 1975 given to him by the U.S. President. The federal government's highest award for distinguished achievement in science and engineering, it has been presented to more than 400 individuals since its establishment in 1962. Another was the John Scott Award from the City of Philadelphia in 1990 for "his invention of semidwarf wheats which have since spread across the world, contributing measurably to the food supplies available worldwide." Since 1834, it has been awarded to many inventors, including Thomas Edison, Madame Curie, the Wright Brothers, and Jonas Salk.

Others among almost 20 honors and forms of recognition include being named a Fellow by the American Society of Agronomy in 1954, awarding of an honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska in 1970, and induction into the U.S. Agricultural Research Service's Science Hall of Fame in 1987. The O.A. Vogel Endowed Chair in Wheat Breeding and Genetics, funded by the Washington Wheat Commission and the Washington State Legislature, was initiated in 1991 at Washington State University.

Archival materials about Vogel's career and life are housed at the Washington State University Libraries at Pullman. An obituary was published in the April 15, 1991 New York Times and in the June/July 1991 alumni publication Washington State University Hilltopics. An entry is in Who Was Who in America, Vol 10 (1993).

Born in 1907 on a farm near Pilger, Stanton County, Nebraska, one of four children of William and Emelia Paege Vogel, he attended rural school until the 7th grade, then attended the Pilger Public Schools, graduating from Pilger High School in 1925. After two years at Yankton College in South Dakota, he taught one year at Wynot High School at Wynot, Nebraska, then earned bachelor and master degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1929 and 1931.

After his marriage to Bertha Berkman in 1931, the couple raised two children, and enjoyed their six grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Orville Vogel died at age 83 on April 12, 1991 at Lacey, Washington.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.