News section

home  |  news  |  solutions  |  forum  |  careers  |  calendar  |  yellow pages  |  advertise  |  contacts

 

Texas A&M University vegetable breeder Leonard Pike may have retired but he doesn't plan to veg out
College Station, Texas
June 5, 2006

In late May 1958, Ish Stivers pulled his car up to the Pike home near rural Hot Springs, Arkansas. The high school agriculture teacher loaded his newly graduated student, Leonard Pike, and drove him to Southern State College in Magnolia.

"I guess he saw something in me and encouraged me to go to college. No one in my family ever had gone beyond high school," Pike recalls.

That kernel of insight and bushel of help from an interested teacher yielded 1015 onions, maroon Beta Sweet carrots, the world's first pickling cucumber for machine harvesting, and more recently, a link to medical scientists via the development of vegetables for improved health. All told, the Arkansas high school boy named Leonard Pike would develop 14 varieties of onions, carrots and cucumbers that to date have drawn billions of dollars for vegetable growers and the Texas economy.

Pike, who recently retired as a Texas A&M University horticulture professor and Texas Agricultural Experiment Station vegetable breeder, talks of his career with humble amazement. After Stivers, Pike recalls, nurturing teachers at the junior college encouraged him to the University of Arkansas for a bachelor's degree, then professors urged him on to a master's degree after which professors again pointed him toward a doctorate. But given a choice of potential agriculture degrees to pursue, Pike recalls, vegetable production had not come to his mind in high school.

"I might have thought I would have chosen animal science," Pike said. "My father was the greens keeper at the Hot Springs Golf and Country Club, and my mother worked full time keeping the house and her garden. I tended to the garden not because I liked it but because I had to."

Yet one notion remained in his mind: Despite the family's meager lifestyle – not getting indoor plumbing until he was 7 years old, for example – the garden helped him and his siblings feel blessed to have abundant, healthful food.

Urged on by horticulture professors, Pike focused on breeding genetically improved onions, carrots and cucumbers while a doctoral student at Michigan State University. By the time he graduated in 1967, several job offers were waiting, among them a position as assistant professor and vegetable breeder at Texas A&M. Again, it was the advice of his major professor that made his decision.

"He said Texas had a lot of opportunities waiting," Pike said. "And I have had a great career here." Cucumbers, he said, are what got him hired at Texas A&M.

"I started the cucumber program here and set the goal of developing a variety that could be mechanically harvested," he said. "Otherwise, you have to pick cucumbers every other day."

In the 1960s, common commercially grown pickling cucumbers did not ripen simultaneously because both male and female flowers were present on the plants. The female flowers would become fertilized at different times, depending on the presence of male flowers, and thus develop fruit in different stages.

Pike successfully bred a cucumber variety – later dubbed Triple Cross – in which the flower is hermaphrodite, or containing both male and female parts, and thus fertilization and fruit development is uniform throughout the field.

"Cucumbers became a very important crop in Texas, as a result," Pike said, noting that Pickle Packers International funded his continued breeding work for almost 30 years.

In 2005, Texas processing pickle growers earned about $8.4 million on 8,000 acres that yielded almost 35,880 tons, according to the Texas Agricultural Statistics Service.

Cucumber achievements led other vegetable growers to seek Pike's work.

Next came the onion growers. "Otha Brand and (the late) Wayne Showers called me to talk about onions, and I asked them what the problem was," Pike said of the beginning of his onion breeding program. Brand and Showers were well-known vegetable growers in the Rio Grande Valley.

The problems were inconsistent yields and pink root disease, Pike said. On the surface, the resolution might have been simply to rotate fields when planting so as to not provide a source for the root disease and thus eliminate it. But the two Rio Grande Valley growers went for more. They asked for better varieties, a request that ultimately would produce the famous 1015, Pike said.

"I had several varieties that were released the same year, and I wanted to name them something that would help farmers remember when to plant them to get staggered harvests," he explained. "If I named them something like Bill, Joe and Dan, that doesn't tell the farmers when to plant. So, I called them 10-15 for Oct. 15, 10-25 for Oct. 25, 11-05 for Nov. 5, and farmers could understand that."

The milder variety might encourage people to eat more, but growers did not like the name "Texas 1015" as it was marketed the first year, Pike said.

"The onion growers had a contest amongst themselves to name the variety and came up with Texas Super Sweet," he said. "But produce buyers were already used to 1015, and they would say to the vegetable shippers, ‘I don't want the Texas Super Sweets, we want the 1015.' We never could get rid of the 1015 name."

Pike said a vegetable industry study of the 1015 onion from 1983-98 showed a $1.2 billion value to the state economy, with $360 million to the farmers during that period. His work paralleled a trend toward eating more onions. The U.S. per capita consumption of onions is now about 21 pounds per year, according to the National Onion Association – a 70 percent increase from 12.2 pounds per person in 1983.

He noted that some of the other onion varieties developed in his program have brought in more money, mostly from international buyers who want the more pungent types, especially in Asian countries. U.S. consumers, however, traditionally have wanted the milder type.

His work with carrots was similar. Growers requested a better variety; Pike's program delivered. One of the most notable is the Texas Gold Spike, a blight-resistant variety with a broom-handled stump that results in more weight – thus more money – for growers.

Texas growers now annually yield about 690 hundredweight of fresh carrots worth $20 million, and 12,400 tons of processing carrots valued at $855,000, according to the Texas Agricultural Statistics Service.

Some of Pike's vegetable breeding success came from trips overseas to collect germplasm from wild plants in their native land from South America to the former Soviet Union and Asia.

"I always thought I was going to these places to help the people there (yield better crops)," Pike said. "But I always found that I learned so much more from them."

One such foreign trip, netted Pike a graduate student – Bhimu Patil, who went to great lengths to plea for a chance to work under the noted horticulturist in the United States. Patil now is following Pike's footsteps as director of the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center.

"Dr. Pike should be used as the model person in bridging the gap between agriculture and medical research," Patil said. "Because he built this center, there are six centers now in the United States – all of them follow from his example."

The leaning toward improving food for health already has resulted in several variety releases, the most famous of which is the Beta Sweet carrot. Pike admits to originally focusing on the carrot because its maroon color would be a novelty for Texas A&M supporters seeking a food with the school's colors. He soon learned from medical researchers that the pigment which caused the color was high in beta carotene, a source of vitamin A and offers, perhaps, some cancer prevention.

"No one really believed in it (breeding vegetables and fruits for increased health benefits) at that time," Pike said. "But medical science started showing in tests with rats that with additives from onions or carrots, there was a 40 percent reduction in cancer. I give the medical community credit for listening to us (plant breeders) that we could change vegetables to be even better."

To Pike, it was graduate students who aided his successful career, and Patil, a who is trained in plant science with an established network among medical scientists that will steer its course in "magnum leaps forward."

To Patil as the new Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center director, future research based on the "farm-to-table concept and industry needs" should be somewhat easier for scientists due to Pike's cornerstone.

Pike plans to continue consulting with the vegetable industry, visit grandchildren and "take my cat for a walk every morning." And ultimately, Pike said, he may do something not done since his youth in Hot Springs. "Maybe when I really do retire, I'll get myself a vegetable garden," he said.

Photo credit: Texas Agricultural Experiment Station

News release

Other news from this source

15,945

Back to main news page

The news release or news item on this page is copyright © 2006 by the organization where it originated.
The content of the SeedQuest website is copyright © 1992-2006 by SeedQuest - All rights reserved
Fair Use Notice