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 |