Setting Down Roots

The Jamestown Sun via Forum News Service
Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016

GRAND FORKS, N.D.—Though the Upper Midwest—and North Dakota especially—is now home to an abundance of agricultural products, few of the major crops grown commercially here actually originated in North American soil.

Before European settlement, much of the region’s landscape was typical to the plains and prairie. Tall grasses dominated the ecosystem while trees rose up near rivers, lakes and other surface waters before giving way to forests farther east.

Hans Kandel, an extension agronomist at North Dakota State University, said crop domestication is a practice with a long history. In most cases, that history mirrors human patterns of migration and trade.

“For small grains, for instance,” Kandel said, “the Fertile Crescent there in the Middle East is kind of the original area.”

The Fertile Crescent, a swath of rich land generally understood to have centered between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in contemporary Iraq, bore witness to ancient Mesopotamia and the early development of agriculture.

“As the crop developed, it started to move,” Kandel said. “If you think about North Dakota, we had people coming into the state from various European countries.”

Wheat crops grown throughout Europe were well adapted to cooler climates, he added, and transferred well to the northern latitudes of North Dakota and Minnesota.

From Selisia, Manchuria

Another—sweeter—European import has also risen to prominence in local soil.

The original sugar beet was first cultivated in the region of Silesia, a stretch of Central-Eastern Europe that spans the modern states of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, under the watch of Prussian growers.

Duane Maatz, Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association executive director, said sweet beets were originally raised as cattle feed. Eventually, the early sugar beet became fodder for people who realized the vegetable’s potential for sweetening.

Prussian development of the beet through time yielded higher sugar contents which soon made the crop valuable to European growers.

By the 1800s, sugar beets made the trans-Atlantic leap to touch down in the U. S.

“They started being grown in California, Colorado and Nebraska,” Maatz said. “Then they learned about it here and became interested in it in 1890.”

At that time, sugar beet farmers in the Red River Valley labored mostly by hand to uproot beets before loading them for transport to a processing plant in Chaska, Minn.

Though beets were catching on in the area, Maatz said it wasn’t until the American Beet Sugar Company sugar mill came online in 1926 in East Grand Forks that local sugar beet production really took off.

“The factory got started before the growing,” Maatz said.

Though an ocean crossing is impressive, other crops make sugar beets and wheat look like they were sown from just next door.

Soybeans have been eaten for so long, that it’s unclear exactly where they first developed, but Kandel said the little green beans found their way to local fields from the region of Manchuria in northeast Asia.

Originally planted for animal feed in more southern parts of the U.S., Kandel said soybeans marched north as their genetics were improved to adapt them to colder climates.

“Now, we have 6 million acres of soybeans in North Dakota,” he said.

Here and There and Back Again

Other crops had a local start, but went abroad for a while before finding a serious following back home. Summer drives through the countryside are all the better for fields of bright yellow sunflowers, but the blooms didn’t always look the way they do now.

“We look at a sunflower as a crop with one head, but there’s a lot of wild sunflowers in the ditches and everywhere which have multiple heads,” Kandel said. “To get it where it is now, a lot of that work was done in what was the former Soviet Union.”

After Soviet agronomists had developed the flower to its more easily utilized shape, the crop caught on back in its former homeland.

Other regional foodstuffs include edible beans and corn, both of which have deep roots in the southern part of North America. Much like soybeans though, Kandel said corn is a relative newcomer to local agriculture, brought north from its ancestral home and into the northern Plains through genetic tweaking.

Still, while the major commercial crops might not exactly be natives, they’ve managed to follow the lead of the people who first grew them by making the region their home.

“A lot of these crops jump around the globe a little bit,” Kandel said. “It’s a great story to think about human interaction and crops and where they move.”

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