The steppes and the Great Plains

Identifying the most appropriate crop varieties was of vital importance for promoting arable farming on the Great Plains of the United States. This was one area in which American government agencies, agricultural scientists, and farmers drew on Russian experience on the steppes. This article is part of a wider study of Russian influences on Great Plains agriculture, which also included scientific study of the soil, in particular the black earth (chernozem) of the steppes and Great Plains,Footnote ⁷ and planting shelterbelts of trees as windbreaks.Footnote ⁸ Studies of the Great Plains often mention the Russian influence and note parallels with the steppes.Footnote ⁹ The Russian influence on the varieties of wheat grown on the Great Plains has been studied by previous historians, most prominently Kansas scholars James C. MalinFootnote ¹⁰ and Norman E. Saul.Footnote ¹¹ This article, which is based on research on two continents, makes more extensive use of Russian materials, such as contemporary sources on the German farmers’ agriculture prior to their migration to the United States and Russian perspectives on the introduction of crops from the steppes to the Great Plains. Fuller use is made of American sources, including under-used materials from the National Archives as well as the extensive publications of Mark Carleton. The Russian influence was only one factor in the development of arable farming on the Great Plains, of course, and Americans drew on other sources and, above all, developed ways to cultivate their grassland on the basis of their own experiences, the work of Agricultural Experiment Stations, education and research in state agricultural colleges, and the efforts of the Department of Agriculture.Footnote ¹²

Contacts developed between the Russian Empire and the United States from the 1860s. Growing numbers of Russians and Americans travelled to each others’ countries, including official representatives, journalists, scientists, and agricultural specialists. Such visits resumed after the hiatus caused by the First World War, the Russian revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War of 1918–20. Before and after 1917, there were Russian/Soviet exhibits at the worlds’ fairs held in the United States. From the 1870s, moreover, the waves of European migrants who crossed the Atlantic included people from the Russian Empire. With greater contacts came a growing awareness in the United States of similarities between the continental scale of the two countries, and also the knowledge that Russia was developing. By the 1890s, however, Saul noted that: ‘Americans, awash with national pride and new found imperialism, were … more prone to compare Russia unfavourably with the United States and Western Europe’. Russian agriculture was seen as ‘backward’ in the wake of the droughts, crop failures, and famines of 1891–2 and 1921–2, which were particularly severe in the steppe region.Footnote ¹³ Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, American agricultural specialists knew little about Russian agricultural research, owing in part to the language barrier (few Americans studied Russian) and the inaccessibility of Russian publications.Footnote ¹⁴ Russian specialists who visited the United States in the early twentieth century, such as soil scientist Nikolai Tulaikov, discovered to their dismay that Russian research was not well known.Footnote ¹⁵

Some Americans did begin to take notice of Russian agriculture, in particular on the steppes. One of the reasons was a recognition of the similarities in the natural environment between the steppes and the Great Plains and that, therefore, they could profit from investigating Russian experiences. Carleton had been angling to be sent to Russia before his appointment as ‘agricultural explorer’. In a letter to Fairchild at the Department of Agriculture in March 1898, three months before his assignment, Carleton wrote that he had made a ‘fairly close study of Russian climate, geography, and agriculture and my conclusion after four years study and trial is that Russian and Siberian wheats are the wheats most admirably adapted to the Great Plains’.Footnote ¹⁶ He later expanded on the parallels. The ‘Chernozem’ or ‘black earth’ of the grain region of Russia, he wrote, was ‘remarkably similar’ to the soils of the American prairies and Great Plains. Both contained large amounts of organic matter (humus) and minerals that were ‘just those usually needed by the wheat plant’. The structure of both soils, moreover, was conducive to plant growth.Footnote ¹⁷ ‘The similarity’, he continued, ‘is fully as great in climate …, both regions being emphatically continental and subject to great extremes of temperature and moisture’. The two regions had ‘long and very severe winters’ and ‘short’ and ‘intensely hot’ summers. His data, however, indicated that, on average, the Great Plains were slightly warmer. His figures on ‘normal annual rainfall’ show more of a contrast, with an average of 15–16 inches for most of the steppe region, while none of the locations he selected on the Great Plains, even those ‘as far west as the hundredth meridian’, received less than 18 inches on average each year.Footnote ¹⁸ Carleton noted a more specific parallel: that the climate of the Crimean region (Tauride province) was very like Kansas: ‘A traveller on the plains of Kansas, if suddenly transported while asleep to South Russia and deposited in the Crimea, would discover very little difference in his surroundings except as to the people and the character of farm implements and livestock.’Footnote ¹⁹

Russians specialists were aware of the similarities. They took a growing interest in the prairies and Great Plains (‘Oblast’ Velikikh ravnin’), regularly publishing articles on the subject from the 1860s and 1870s onwards.Footnote ²⁰ In 1870, while on an official visit, the Grand Duke Aleksei, younger son of Tsar Alexander II, went on a buffalo hunt in Nebraska in the company of Buffalo Bill and General Custer.Footnote ²¹ With rather more respect for the natural world, Russian soil scientists, anticipating Carleton, drew direct parallels between the black earth of much of the Russian steppes and the soils of similar regions in other parts of the world. In the late 1890s, pioneering Russian soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev proposed a theory of natural zones that extended around the northern hemisphere. He placed the ‘black-earth steppes’ of Russia, Asia, and America in the same zone.Footnote ²² In 1927, on an excursion following the first international soil science congress in Washington, DC, a Soviet scientist described their journey across Kansas. At Hays, in the centre of the state, they saw ‘southern chernozems’. Further west, beyond the 100th meridian, ‘before us lay the familiar landscape of our southeast: arid, short-grass steppe, salt flats … and mirages on the horizon’.Footnote ²³

There were also differences between the two regions. The most obvious was their orientation. The steppes extend from west to east and the climate becomes drier and more extreme, and the soils more alkaline, to the south and east. The Great Plains are orientated from south to north, and the aridity of the climate and alkalinity of the soil increase to the west.Footnote ²⁴ A further contrast is that the steppes extend as far south as the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Steppe farmers transported their grain by river or overland to ports such as Odessa for export before the advent of railways in the late nineteenth century. The Volga river, moreover, was a vital artery for shipping grain north and, eventually, to the Baltic ports. In contrast, the Great Plains are right in the centre of North America, and large-scale international trade in their produce had to await the arrival of the railroads.Footnote ²⁵ Perhaps the most important contrast is that the climate of the Russian steppes is generally harsher – with less moisture and greater extremes of temperature – than the American Plains. Carleton wrote that Samara, ‘near the heart of the Volga wheat region’, had less rainfall and greater extremes of temperature than Bismarck, North Dakota, which was considered ‘extremely dry for wheat growing’.Footnote ²⁶

Perhaps the main reason for American interest in Russian steppe agriculture was that the two countries were the main rivals in the expanding world market in grain. Despite the more severe climate and alleged ‘backwardness’, in the decades prior to 1914 it was the Russian Empire that was the world’s largest exporter of grain. Only in years of catastrophic harvest failure, such as 1891, was the United States able to overtake the Russians in the grain market as a whole. The Americans exported more wheat than the Russians in some years, however, and American competition was stronger in certain markets. In Britain from the 1870s, American wheat replaced soft, spring wheat from the Russian steppes. Farmers on the steppes responded by growing more hard, durum wheat for the southern European market, where it was used to make pasta.Footnote ²⁷

Russian specialists started following American agriculture before the Americans began to take an interest in the steppes. In the 1840s and 1850s, Russians expressed mixed views on whether the growth of American grain production on the prairies would threaten their export trade. Some pointed to the vast distance from the prairies to the east-coast ports as a constraint on American exports.Footnote ²⁸ Over the following decades, however, Russian specialists watched as railroads were built, abolishing the distance, taking settlers onto the Great Plains and bringing back grain in ever larger quantities for consumption in the eastern states and for export to Europe, where it caused prices to fall and posed a serious threat to Russian exporters.Footnote ²⁹ Some urged that lessons needed to be learned from American agriculture.Footnote ³⁰ In the 1890s, the Russian government looked to the American system of agricultural experiment stations as a model for a national network based on existing stations.Footnote ³¹ Other areas in which Russian specialists were aware that farming on the Great Plains was more advanced, and from which they sought to learn, were mechanization and storage and inspection of grain.Footnote ³² One of the ways in which the Russian government competed with its chief rival was by promoting its agricultural produce. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the Russians went to great pains to display their grain to its best advantage. The General Commissar of the Russian section reported to Minister of Finance Sergei Witte: ‘with a feeling of national pride I can say that our grain under expert analysis was shown to be of such high quality … that it was superior not only to all foreign, but even the American [grain]’.Footnote ³³

Competition in the world grain trade encouraged the Americans, in turn, to pay attention to Russian agriculture on the steppes. In 1890, stressing the need to keep up to date with the work of European agricultural scientists, invest in Agricultural Experiment Stations, and study American soils, the US Secretary of Agriculture stated that they must not spare any efforts in order to ‘maintain our proud preeminence as the leading agricultural country’.Footnote ³⁴ The Americans advertised their successes in growing grain, producing agricultural machinery, and in agricultural sciences at the world fairs.Footnote ³⁵ The US Department of Agriculture undertook a detailed study of Russian wheat production and trade in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was carried out by a specialist of Russian origin, I.M. Rubinow, who thus was able to read the extensive Russian literature. In comparison with wheat production in the United States, Rubinow noted the harsher climate in the Russian wheat belt, the ‘primitive techniques’ and low level of mechanization, the lower yields, poorer quality, and less developed infrastructure for transporting and storing wheat. He noted that changes were under way, however, which could provide advantages for Russian exporters in the future. More immediately, however, he reported that the area sown with wheat in Russia was growing more rapidly than in the United States, and that exports of Russian wheat had overtaken American exports in 1903.Footnote ³⁶

There was a crucial difference between the Russian and American experiences on the steppes and Great Plains, and one that goes some way to explaining why the Americans learned from the Russians: the development of arable farming on the steppes preceded similar trends on the Great Plains by over a century. The agricultural settlement of the steppes took off in the mid eighteenth century;Footnote ³⁷ it was not until the 1860s that farmers began to settle on the Great Plains in large numbers. American settlers staked their claims for homesteads under the 1862 act and bought land from railroad companies, whose transcontinental lines crossed the plains.Footnote ³⁸ The Russians may have been the first to settle and cultivate their grasslands but the Americans did so more quickly. Sergei Bulgakov noted that, without the railroads, the American settlement would possibly have taken centuries rather than decades.Footnote ³⁹ In 1901, a Russian specialist noted:

If there were differences in the timing and speed of the agricultural settlement of the steppes and the Great Plains, the processes were similar. Indeed, they were part of a larger story of the transformation of the grasslands of the interiors of Eurasia and both North and South American continents, as well as parts of Australasia, into arable land inhabited by farmers, who grew cereal crops to feed the world’s industrializing cities. Most of the incoming farmers on all the grasslands were of European stock. Indeed, farmers of German descent moved onto the steppes and then to the prairies and Great Plains of North America and the Pampas of South America.Footnote ⁴¹ With the exception of maize, which was indigenous to the Americas, the grain crops they grew had originated in the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia in ancient times, before being gradually introduced to other parts of the globe. This trend was taking on a new pace with the expansion of wheat cultivation in continental interiors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁴² American soil scientist Curtis Marbut was not exaggerating too much when he described the ‘shift to wheat’ on the grasslands as ‘the most important revolution in world agriculture that has ever taken place’.Footnote ⁴³

The transformation of the grasslands is part of an even wider story of the ‘triumph of the European invaders’, with their plants, livestock, weeds, and germs, in temperate zones ‘in the Americas and Australasia’ that Alfred Crosby termed ‘Neo-Europes’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In all the grassland regions of these Neo-Europes, the European farmers with their Eurasian crops replaced considerably smaller, largely nomadic, populations who had lived mostly by herding and hunting livestock, for example the nomadic pastoralists of the steppe and Native American buffalo hunters of the Great Plains. These indigenous peoples’ pastoral ways of life were appropriate to the semi-arid environments, as they could cope well with the low and unreliable rainfall.Footnote ⁴⁵ By regularly burning the grasslands to promote the growth of fresh grasses for fodder for their livestock, moreover, native populations had contributed to the development of treeless landscapes.Footnote ⁴⁶ Most of the incoming farmers came from quite different environments, which were moister, wooded, and had less fertile soils, to the north and west of the steppes, and to the east of the Great Plains and prairies. Their ways of life were not well adapted to the semi-arid grassland environment. They had to adapt their crops and farming methods to the rich, black earth, but also to the shortage of moisture, recurring droughts, scarcity of trees, and winds that dried out the soil and created dust storms.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1857, a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, reported that ‘to a large proportion of our farmers, this soil and climate are so different from what they have been accustomed to, that for some time they will be obliged to work comparatively in the dark’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Mennonites

One group of settlers on the Great Plains was not in the dark, however, as they had moved from a region with a similar environment: from the 1870s, large numbers of farmers of German origin moved from the steppes of the Russian Empire to North America. Many acquired land on the Great Plains.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their forebears had responded to invitations to settle on the steppes by the Russian government in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Settlers were offered land along the lower Volga river and to the north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, together with privileges such as exemptions from taxes and military service. The Russian government hoped that the German settlers would be model farmers who would assist in the development of agriculture on the steppes. It is a measure of their success that the tsarist authorities were loath to see so many leave in the 1870s.Footnote ⁵⁰

Of particular importance for this article are Mennonites, who moved from the Crimean region (Tauride province) to Kansas in 1873–4. They included a group from the Molochna/Molotschna colony near the north coast of the Sea of Azov. The colony had been founded in around 1803 by migrants from the Danzig area; they worked hard to establish themselves on the barren steppes and to adapt to the local conditions, including the ever-present threat of drought. From 1830, Forestry and Agricultural Societies, led by the enterprising Johann Cornies, promoted economic development. The Mennonites planted fruit trees and mulberry trees for silk worms, kept large herds of sheep and dairy cattle, and grew grain. Most used a four-field crop rotation with a fallow field kept clean of vegetation, known as black fallow, to improve the retention of scarce moisture in the soil. Wheat production developed rapidly from the 1840s as farmers ploughed up land previously used for pasture, and sowed wheat for two years rather than one in their rotation. Mennonite wheat exported from ports on the Sea of Azov came to be greatly valued on the European market.Footnote ⁵¹ While the relative success of the Mennonites and other farmers of German origin on the steppes reflected their sobriety, hard work, and enterprise, it was also due to the fact that they had been allocated more land under more privileged conditions than their Slav neighbours. The latter were not able, for example, to keep the fallow field ‘black’, because they needed to graze their livestock on it.Footnote ⁵²

In spite of their relatively privileged position, some Mennonites decided to leave the Russian Empire in the early 1870s. They feared that an impending reform would end the exemption from military service that their religious beliefs demanded. The Russian authorities were increasingly interfering in their lives in other ways. In addition, there were disagreements among the Mennonites over religious matters, and further tensions as a result of the growing numbers of landless Mennonites.Footnote ⁵³ They may also have been prompted to leave by an outbreak of cholera in Tauride province in 1872.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, droughts had caused several poor harvests in the decade before their departure.Footnote ⁵⁵ Drought had a further consequence: in 1873, a visitor described how drifts of dust the height of the fence were covering the Rozenhof farmhouse every day, and all the efforts of the farm were used not for transporting grain, ‘of which there was none’, but for taking cartloads of dust out onto the steppe.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Mennonites considered several destinations in North and South America. They were encouraged to move to the United States by co-religionists who already lived there, and by the reports of representatives, for example Bernhard Warkentin from Molochna, who crossed the Atlantic in 1872. The American and Canadian governments, as well as railroad companies, competed to attract these successful farmers. They gave them assurances that they would not be required to perform military service. A further consideration was the natural environment. The Mennonites’ representatives found good soil throughout the Great Plains. Warkentin advised against Canada, as the climate was too harsh, and warned them off Texas, since it was too hot: he favoured Kansas. A delegation of Mennonites visited North America in 1873 and made agreements with several railroad companies to purchase land. One group clinched a deal with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad company over tracts of virgin prairie in Marion, Harvey, and McPherson counties in east-central Kansas. The following year, groups of Mennonites sold their farms on the steppes and made the long journey to the Great Plains. Among them was the Alexanderwohl congregation from Molochna. Originally destined for Nebraska, they changed their minds and founded their new community in Marion County, Kansas. Around 12,000 Germans from the Russian Empire moved to Kansas in the 1870s: around half were Mennonites from the Crimean region and adjoining districts; the other half were mostly Roman Catholics from the Volga region, who settled further west, around Hays. Newspapers in Kansas described the newcomers as hardworking, frugal, and peaceful.Footnote ⁵⁷ One of the Mennonite elders told the Topeka Commonwealth that in three years they would transform the ‘ocean of grass’ of the prairies ‘into an ocean of waving fields of grain, just as we left our Molotschna colony’. The newspaper predicted that Kansas would be ‘to America what the country of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov is now to Europe – her wheat field’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Mennonites, it is said, brought with them from the steppes to Kansas some of their hard, winter wheat. This Crimean (Krymka in Russian, Krimsch in German) wheat became known in America as Turkey or Turkey Red. Bernhard Warkentin mentioned in a letter to Mark Carleton in late 1900 that ‘hard winter wheat’ from the Crimea ‘originally was brought here to Kansas by the Mennonites, which [sic] settled in 1873 in Marion County’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Carleton, who was well acquainted with the Kansas Mennonites and visited Molochna in 1900, elaborated in 1914: ‘Each family brought over a bushel or more of Crimean wheat for seed, and from this seed was grown the first crop of Kansas hard winter wheat.’ He added that ‘Bernard Warkentin … was chiefly instrumental in introducing the Turkey wheat’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The story, with different Mennonites given the credit, has been related many, many times. In 1949, Mennonite historian Cornelius Krahn wrote:

The Mennonite Heritage Museum, near the new Alexanderwohl church in Marion County, has among its exhibits a chest, which they say is one of those in which the wheat was carried.Footnote ⁶² In the words of two Kansas agronomists in 1974, the Turkey wheat ‘established the hard red winter wheat industry, [and] answered for all time the critics who doubted the future of wheat on the Plains’.Footnote ⁶³ The Kansas State Legislature proclaimed 1974 ‘the year of centennial celebration of the introduction of Turkey red hard winter wheat [by Mennonites from Russia] into Kansas and the beginning of the great wheat industry in Kansas’. The Mennonite Life magazine proudly reprinted the resolution.Footnote ⁶⁴ The introduction of Turkey Red wheat to Kansas by the Mennonites is reported as fact at the present time by the Kansas office of the Department of Agriculture.Footnote ⁶⁵

Objections have been raised to the story, nevertheless, most notably by Kansas historians James Malin and Norman Saul, although neither doubted that the Mennonites played some part in the introduction of hard, winter wheat. Malin, writing in the 1940s, doubted that ‘without the Mennonites there would be no hard winter wheat in the Middle Great Plains region’. He went on:

Saul described the story as ‘largely a myth … but like all myths it has some factual basis’. He could find no ‘public references to the 1874 Mennonites bringing Turkey Red’ until 1910.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is interesting that, in an article published in 1901, Carleton made no reference to the story of them bringing wheat with them in 1874, referring instead to their experience on the steppes of growing wheat in an environment with recurring droughts and cold winters.Footnote ⁶⁸

Investigating precisely what sort of wheat was introduced by the Mennonites, from where and when, is complex. The varieties of wheat grown in the United States had come from many sources, and had been introduced over a long period of time. Key differences that need to be understood here are between winter and spring wheats, and between hard and soft wheats. Winter wheats were sown in the autumn, while spring wheats were sown in the spring. The latter were more common in regions with harsher climates, where autumn-sown wheat was likely to be killed off by very cold winters or spring frosts. The distinction between winter and spring wheats was not absolute, however, as varieties sown in the spring in one location were sown in the autumn in others with more moderate winters. The other key difference, between hard and soft wheats, was very important in the trade, as they were used for different purposes and had different markets. The very hard, durum wheats were used to make pasta, and were exported to southern Europe. Bread was made from soft wheats, whose main markets were in northern and western Europe. To compound the problem of definition, Russia and the United States at this time had different systems for classifying wheat. In Russia, the term ‘hard’ was used only for durum wheats, and Crimean wheat – whose provenance is under investigation here – was considered ‘soft’. In the American system, however, the same variety, known as Turkey Red, was considered hard. There were many names for different varieties, moreover, and they were not always used precisely or consistently.Footnote ⁶⁹ It may be best, therefore, to use the system employed by Carleton, who understood the differences between wheat varieties and had experience in both the United States and Russia. He distinguished between three groups: ‘soft bread wheats’; ‘hard bread wheats’, in which he included Turkey Red; and durum wheats, which had the hardest grains.Footnote ⁷⁰ What is at issue at this point is hard wheats in Carleton’s second group that were sown in the autumn as ‘winter wheats’. (Hard, spring, durum wheats will be considered later in this article.)

Neither Malin nor Saul could find any contemporary references to the Mennonites bringing wheat with them in 1873–4, but accepted that some families probably did bring small quantities. A more important objection to the story is that the Mennonites could not have brought sufficient seed all the way from the steppes to sow the area of land they cultivated in their early years in Kansas. There is evidence that Mennonites purchased seed after they arrived, and that the railroad companies distributed seed of soft winter and spring wheats to the new arrivals. At the time the Mennonites came to Kansas, moreover, local farmers already grew a wide range of wheat varieties, and it is possible that hard, winter wheat was already there. A serious objection to the Mennonites’ story is Saul’s view that they had not grown the hard, winter wheat that proved so successful on the Great Plains when they lived in Molochna, but had grown mostly Girka, a soft, spring wheat, and Arnautka, a hard, spring, durum wheat.Footnote ⁷¹ Saul argued that, after they moved to Kansas, the Mennonites and Volga Germans converted a hard, spring, durum wheat into a winter wheat by planting it in the autumn, thus taking advantage of the hardiness of Russian wheats and the milder Kansas winters.Footnote ⁷²

The argument that the hard, winter wheat known as Turkey Red in the United States was a hard, spring wheat, such as Arnautka from the Russian steppes, does not, however, stand up to scrutiny. Saul’s main source, an entry in a dictionary of agriculture by S. M. Bogdanov, is not conclusive. Bogdanov noted that Arnautka was grown in the United States as a winter wheat and added that another name for Arnautka was Krasnoturka (‘Red Turk’). But, this was not a reference to its American name, as he gave it in Russian. In any case, he stated that it was in the south-western states, not Kansas, that Arnautka was sown in the autumn. Bogdanov, moreover, had already mentioned another Russian wheat grown in the United States: Red Russian (he used the English name), which was a red, winter wheat, and not a durum wheat.Footnote ⁷³ ‘Red Russian’ was another name used for Turkey Red by American farmers.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whichever name was used, moreover, it was quite distinct from durum wheats such as Arnautka. According to Carleton, durum wheats (Triticum durum) had ‘yellowish white’ grains, while Turkey was a red-grained variety of ‘common wheat’ (Triticum vulgare), which was ‘not nearly so hard’ as the durum wheats.Footnote ⁷⁵

Furthermore, the argument by Saul that the Mennonites did not grow hard, winter wheats when they lived in Molochna on the steppes can also be disproved. According to Mennonite historians based in the United States, as wheat production for the export market developed in Molochna from the 1850s, they ‘shifted to hard winter wheat’, such as ‘Red Turkey’ and ‘Crimean’, for which there was more demand.Footnote ⁷⁶ Carleton stated in 1914 that ‘in the Molochna district spring wheat was grown up to 1860, when Turkey wheat was introduced from the Crimea [that is, the peninsula], and entirely replaced the spring wheat’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The veracity of these claims can be tested by researching what Saul referred to as the unwritten ‘Russian chapter of Turkey Red’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Russian accounts from the 1840s and 1850s confirm that Girka, a soft, spring wheat, and Arnautka, a hard, spring, durum wheat, were indeed the main types grown in Molochna.Footnote ⁷⁹ Farmers on the Crimean peninsula were growing ‘red’ winter wheat in the late 1850s and 1860s, where it was preferred to spring wheat for its drought resistance. But farmers on the northern side of the Sea of Azov, where Molochna was situated, felt the conditions were better suited to spring wheat, which did not have to survive the cold winter and spring frosts.Footnote ⁸⁰ A very small amount of winter wheat was sown in Molochna in 1863.Footnote ⁸¹ This was the start of a trend. The economist Vladimir Postnikov, who visited Molochna in 1881, wrote that the Germans had been cultivating winter wheat successfully ‘for over ten years’, that is, since before the migration to Kansas. The Mennonites had overcame the problem of winter wheat being killed off by spring frosts in the 1870s by harrowing the fields in the spring to cover the shoots and thus protect them. They also preferred winter to spring wheat, as the latter had been badly affected by rust in recent years.Footnote ⁸² Throughout the steppe region to the north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and in the nearby north Caucasus, the cultivation of hard, winter wheat spread in the late nineteenth century, and it was the predominant type of wheat grown by the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸³ In 1891, Postnikov noted that the winter wheat that the Mennonites grew on the steppes was mainly Crimean:Footnote ⁸⁴ the variety that turned up in Kansas. Thus, by the time the Mennonites moved to Kansas, the farmers in Molochna had switched to hard, winter wheats on account of their resistance to drought and disease.

Within a few years of their arrival in Kansas, Mennonite farmers were growing some hard, winter wheat. Their success, especially in times of drought, brought it to wider attention. The first references Malin found in the Kansas press to ‘Turkey or Russian wheat’ were during the dry years of 1879–81. The wheat was reported to be more resistant to drought and seemed to suffer less damage from pests. As news of its qualities spread, more farmers in east-central Kansas began to sow the ‘Turkey’ or ‘Russian’ wheat, which, the press began to report, had been introduced by the Mennonites. Harder wheats required different milling technology and, from the 1870s, Kansas millers were starting to adapt. One of the Mennonites, Bernhard Warkentin, set up the Newton Mill and Elevator Company in Newton, Harvey County, in 1886, and equipped it with the new technology.Footnote ⁸⁵ According to Mennonite sources, Warkentin shipped large quantities of hard wheat to Kansas when he visited his former home on the steppes in 1885 or 1886. It is more certain that Warkentin imported ‘a lot of fine and clean’, ‘genuine Crimean hard winter’ wheat from his brother-in-law in Molochna in 1895.Footnote ⁸⁶ How the hard, winter wheat first reached Kansas will probably never be conclusively proved, as the Mennonites’ story cannot be fully corroborated from other sources, but there is no doubt of the Mennonites’ role in expanding its cultivation in Kansas.

Mark Alfred Carleton and the US Department of Agriculture

The next part of the story is better documented. The Kansas State Agricultural College, in Manhattan, Kansas, began to conduct experiments into the most appropriate varieties of wheat, and other crops, and the best ways to cultivate them, in the mid 1870s. From 1887, the experiments were carried out by the new state Agricultural Experiment Station in the same location. The scientists acquired crop varieties from experiment stations in other states and from local farmers. Among the varieties tested were ‘Russian’ and ‘Turkey’ wheats, which gave mixed results in the early years. This began to change from around 1893. Over the rest of the 1890s, the Turkey wheat demonstrated its ability to withstand dry springs, cold springs and late frosts, and severe winters.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Kansas Experiment Station reported in 1897: ‘The Turkey is the most promising [of the 35 varieties tested] because it yields well and is hardy.’Footnote ⁸⁸ One of the scientists involved in the experiments in the early 1890s was a botany graduate from the agricultural college: Mark Alfred Carleton. For much of the 1890s he was involved in tests on wheat in the experiment stations in Kansas, Nebraska, and Washington, DC. This was the point at which he became interested in the wheat varieties from Russia, in particular the steppes, including durum wheats as well as hard, winter wheats, such as Turkey. He became a specialist in crop diseases, especially rust, and noted that Russian wheats resisted rust ‘quite well’.Footnote ⁸⁹ It was also in this period that Carleton became acquainted with the Kansas Mennonites. In October 1894, he reported from Newton, Kansas, to his superior in Washington that he was ‘investigating the methods of wheat culture … among the Mennonite Russians’. In late 1896, he was impressed by the way they had ‘continued to have good harvests’ at a time when the wheat crop had failed throughout much of the Great Plains due to adverse conditions.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the end of the 1890s, moreover, Carleton and Bernhard Warkentin were conducting experiments on Turkey wheat in Halstead, Kansas.Footnote ⁹¹ Meanwhile, on the steppes of the Russian Empire, similar experiments on wheat were being carried out, and hard, red, winter wheats, including ‘Crimean’, were performing well in harsh conditions.Footnote ⁹²

The experiments in Kansas were the background to Carleton’s ‘study of Russian climate, geography, and agriculture’, noting the parallels between the steppes and the Great Plains, and his desire to travel to Russia in the late 1890s referred to at the start of this article. Carleton sailed for Russia from New York in early July 1898. His suggested itinerary would take him overland from Bremen to Odessa, and thence in an anticlockwise direction to ‘the Crimea, and north eastward through the [provinces] of Taurida, Ekaterinoslav, Kursk, Voronezh, Saratov, etc to Perm; then return by way of Moscow, St Petersburg’. He also wished to ‘visit a few places in West Siberia’. Since he had already travelled extensively when he arrived in Odessa, where he annoyed US Consul Heenan, in January 1899, however, his actual trip seems to have been made in the opposite direction. Carleton visited many provinces in both the less fertile, non-black earth provinces of northern and north-central Russia as well as the fertile ‘steppe or Chernozem region’ further south. He also travelled a long way east, to the Urals and beyond. He met Russian agricultural specialists, but ‘agricultural exploration’ was his main concern. By his own account, he collected ‘twenty-three varieties of cereals [seven … of wheat], one of buckwheat, and two of forage plants … and sample packets of seeds of other cereals and grasses for breeding purposes … In addition …, arrangements were made for the importation of others fully as valuable.’

When he wrote up his trip, he recorded the soil and climate of the areas where he collected the varieties, and indicated the parts of the United States to which he thought they would be suited. Bearing in mind the more severe climate on the steppes, Carleton deliberately travelled to areas with harsh conditions, as he believed that ‘varieties brought from Russia are all the better adapted for cultivation in this country, as they are already used to even more rigorous conditions of climate than they will have to endure here’. His main interest on this trip was not hard, red, winter wheats such as Turkey, however, but ‘durum wheats’. He assigned first place in the wheats he collected to ‘Kubanka spring wheat’, a durum wheat that he ‘obtained in the Turghai territory, in the Kirghiz steppes’, not far from the present-day Russian border with Kazakhstan. The conditions there were quite extreme: 15 inches or less rainfall a year; short, intensely hot summers; and soil ‘much grayer than the usual black earth’. He believed Kubanka was well adapted to the drier southern Great Plains and more arid land further west. He also collected varieties of ‘common wheat’, which he believed suited to the northern Great Plains.Footnote ⁹³

By May 1900, Carleton’s duties had taken him back to Europe to prepare the American grain exhibits for the Exposition Universelle in Paris.Footnote ⁹⁴ From Paris he corresponded with Bernhard Warkentin, in Kansas, to arrange another trip to the Russian Empire. This time he planned to visit Molochna and the surrounding region in Tauride province. Warkentin sent him letters of introduction to his brother, Gerhard, and brother-in-law, Jacob Enns, and wrote to his relatives in Molochna asking them to assist Carleton when he arrived. Warkentin advised Carleton on the best route from Odessa to the ‘German Colonies along the Malotchna river’. In return, he asked Carleton to ship him ‘a lot of strictly clean hard winter wheat (Turkey), the same variety we are raising in Kansas’. Once his work for the Exposition was completed, Carleton set out to study ‘the Crimea as a wheat region’ as ‘an exact parallel with Kansas and Nebraska’, and to obtain hard winter wheat for the Department of Agriculture as well as Warkentin.Footnote ⁹⁵ Once in Molochna, with Enns’ assistance, Carleton shipped the wheat Warkentin wanted to Kansas.Footnote ⁹⁶ Carleton also sought out hardier varieties, similar to Turkey, which could be grown further north and west on the Great Plains, where the climate was colder and drier than Kansas. He travelled north-east to eastern Khar’kov province, which ‘possesses a climate nearly or quite as severe as South Dakota’, where he obtained the ‘Kharkov Winter Wheat’. He also went east and acquired a variety from the north Caucasus, which was more drought resistant and, he believed, suitable for western Nebraska and eastern Colorado.Footnote ⁹⁷ In addition, he brought back some Arnautka, a durum wheat, from southern and eastern Russia. The wheat varieties that Carleton collected on his second trip to the steppes were destined mostly for Agricultural Experiment Stations across the Great Plains.Footnote ⁹⁸

On his return, Carleton vigorously promoted the commercial cultivation on the Great Plains of the wheat varieties he brought back, and their use in the American food industry. He published a substantial article and several ‘bulletins’ for the Department of Agriculture.Footnote ⁹⁹ Promoting the hard, winter wheats, such as Turkey, was not too difficult as they were already becoming established. Indeed, Warkentin and his fellow grain dealers in Kansas imported several thousand more bushels from Russia for seed in 1901.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Farmers on the Great Plains, moreover, started writing to the Department of Agriculture with requests for ‘Russian wheat’ or ‘Turkey Red wheat’. The Department ordered more wheat from suppliers in Odessa.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Tests conducted under Carleton’s supervision in Kansas in the early 1900s on the Crimean and Kharkov varieties demonstrated again the resistance of hard, red, winter wheats to rust, and their high yields.Footnote ¹⁰²

Carleton knew that he faced a harder task in promoting the durum wheats. The Department of Agriculture had imported some Arnautka in 1864, and more was brought by immigrants from Russia to North Dakota. Nevertheless, durum wheats were little known or grown in the United States when Carleton brought some back in 1899.Footnote ¹⁰³ There was opposition. In August 1901, the Department of Agriculture had to deny press reports that its sowings of what was briefly known as ‘macaroni wheat’ had been killed by drought. Serious resistance came from the Minneapolis millers, who would have to buy new machinery to grind the harder grains. Carleton worked hard to win them over, for example speaking to the millers’ national convention in 1903. The trade paper, the Northwestern Miller conducted a prolonged campaign that prompted Carleton’s superior to write: ‘Probably the best course to pursue would be to let the editor go his own way and hang himself on his own yard.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Carleton argued for the cultivation of durum wheats because they were resistant to drought and rust, and would thus allow the expansion of grain production into more arid parts of the Great Plains. This was precisely what he was seeking to facilitate, as part of a global search for hardier grains to grow in more extreme environments. He further argued that there were markets in southern Europe, where he believed American durum wheat could compete with Russian, and also at home for the production of macaroni and, mixed with red wheat, to make flour for bread and other products. Such was his zeal that he advocated its use in muffins, breakfast cereals, and other products, and printed recipes for macaroni cheese.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Tests showed that durum wheats were better suited to the northern plains than the southern plains, contrary to what Carleton had initially supposed. As news spread of the durum wheat’s resistance to drought and disease, farmers began to sow it. From 1901 to 1903 alone, production increased from 100,000 to 6,000,000 bushels. Dealers bought the wheat and millers adapted their machinery, as markets did indeed develop at home and abroad. In late 1918, the Northwestern Miller (presumably with a new editor) reported that durum wheat was selling at a premium in the Great Lakes ports of Minneapolis and Duluth.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Carleton trumpeted the triumph of the wheat he had brought back from the steppes;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Russian specialists also noted the success of varieties of Russian origin on the Great Plains.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The extent of the success can be gauged from the acreages of the Russian wheats sown in the USA in 1919. In Kansas and Nebraska, around 82% of the wheat area was sown with ‘Turkey’ varieties, and in Oklahoma and Colorado the proportion was roughly two-thirds. Durum wheats had found their niche. In North and South Dakota, the percentages of the total wheat area where they were sown were around 29% and 17% respectively. In neighbouring Wyoming, 24% of the wheat area was sown with durum wheat. In the USA as whole, ‘Turkey’ was the most widespread variety, sown in almost 30% of the total acreage under wheat. Durum wheats were grown in around 6% of the nation’s wheat fields.

After Turkey, the most popular variety was Marquis, with around 16% of the wheat area; it was the most widespread type in the Dakotas.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Marquis was a hard, red, spring wheat, introduced to the United States by the Department of Agriculture in 1912–13 from Canada. It was a hybrid of an Indian wheat and Red Fife. The latter had arrived in North America in 1842, via Glasgow and Danzig, from Galicia, in western Ukraine, on the edge of the steppes.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Carleton believed that Fife wheat came from ‘Russia’,Footnote ¹¹¹ although its origins were unclear at the time.

The success of Marquis wheat on the northern plains again indicates the suitability of crops from the steppes to environmental counterparts in North America. The Kubanka variety of durum wheat, however, succumbed to disease from around 1918, and was gradually replaced by other durum wheats.Footnote ¹¹² Turkey, however, retained its pre-eminence in the interwar years. Among its chief rivals were Kanred and Tenmarq, which had been produced at the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station, using selection and hybridization techniques, from Turkey and Crimean wheats. Turkey wheat continued to feature in the pedigrees of hybrids grown on the Great Plains in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹³ The testing of new wheat varieties from the steppes on the Great Plains continued after the Russian revolution. In 1928, for example, the US Department of Agriculture requested new varieties of winter wheats, including ‘Nova-Krimka’ (‘New Crimean’).Footnote ¹¹⁴ This was prior to the formal recognition of the new Soviet regime by the USA in 1933,Footnote ¹¹⁵ once again indicating the importance that the American government attached to agriculture.

Conclusion

The introduction of Russian wheat from the steppes on the Great Plains was of enormous and enduring significance to American agriculture. Two American historians have argued that improvements in wheat varieties, due in no small part to introductions from Russia, were at least as important as mechanization in the considerable increase in the productivity of American wheat farming between the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Not all Russian imports were beneficial, however. In around 1874, farmers who moved from the steppes to the Dakota territory apparently brought with their flax seed a plant that became known as Russian thistle. It spread rapidly as a tumbleweed throughout the northern and central plains, where it had caused millions of dollars worth of damage by the 1890s. Despite attempts to eradicate it, Russian thistle has continued to spread.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The ‘success’ of the Russian thistle somewhat modifies Crosby’s assertion that the ‘Great Plains region … is the most mysterious exception to the success story of Old World weeds in the Neo-Europes’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It does not, however, challenge his overall argument about the success of Europeans and their crops in temperate zones, such as the Great Plains, around the globe. This article has demonstrated the great success of wheat from the steppes on the Great Plains, which was part of a larger process of the successful introduction of wheat and other crops from the Old World in the Americas and Australasia.

The Russians conducted experiments on American and other foreign varieties of wheat, but with mixed results. Many struggled to survive the Russian winter, and existing varieties were seen as superior in other ways. In the 1890s, the Russian Ministry of Agriculture preferred to distribute improved Russian seed to foreign varieties, partly to encourage the production of improved crops in Russia, but also because it believed that Russian crops were more appropriate to ‘our climate and other conditions’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Maize was introduced to the Russian steppes from the Americas long before Khrushchev’s ill-conceived attempt to promote its cultivation in other regions of the Soviet Union with inappropriate environments.Footnote ¹²⁰ Indeed, some Mennonites in Molochna started growing maize in the 1870s.Footnote ¹²¹ For the most part, however, it was Russian/Eurasian cereals that were successfully transplanted to North America and other parts of the globe, and not the other way round.

The success of Russian wheat on the Great Plains can be contrasted with serious problems for agriculture on the steppes and in post-revolutionary Russia as a whole. Grain exports, in which Russia led the world, came to a halt during the First World War, as the Germans and Turks prevented Russian ships leaving the Baltic and Black Seas. In 1921, in the wake of a catastrophic drought, crop failure, and famine, which hit the Volga steppes particularly badly, the Americans organized relief in Soviet Russia. On the request of the People’s Commisariat for Agriculture, the American Relief Administration supplied large quantities of spring wheat seed. The seed was carefully selected from the northern Great Plains, where the conditions were closest to the Volga region, and ‘consisted of hard [durum] wheat …, that had at one time been received in America from Russia …, and … “Marquis”’, which, as we have seen, was partly of Ukrainian origin.Footnote ¹²²

Grain exports from the Soviet Russia resumed, at a much lower level, in the mid 1920s. In the early 1930s, however, there was an upsurge of grain exports from the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹²³ The Soviet government needed money to pay for foreign, especially American, technology, imported for the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32).Footnote ¹²⁴ At the same time, the Soviet authorities were collectivizing agriculture, and doing so most quickly on the steppes. They planned to emulate American-style, large-scale, mechanized grain cultivation, and imported large numbers of American tractors.Footnote ¹²⁵ Among the beneficiaries of the collapse of wheat exports from the steppes since 1914 had been American farmers on the prairies and Great Plains. In the early 1930s, however, they were facing disaster with the onset of depression, drought, and the dust bowl.Footnote ¹²⁶ A resumption in serious competition from grain grown on the steppes was a further threat.Footnote ¹²⁷ American specialists made mixed forecasts for Soviet collectivized agriculture. Curtis Marbut, who had visited the Soviet Union and grain farms on the steppes in 1930–1, predicted that by 1933 ‘Russia’ would be able to export more wheat than before 1914.Footnote ¹²⁸ Vladimir Timoshenko, a political emigrant from Ukraine based at the University of Michigan, argued that the Soviet plan was not realistic.Footnote ¹²⁹

Timoshenko’s forecast was the more accurate. Soviet agriculture proved to be capable of consistently producing neither large surpluses for export nor even, in time, sufficient amounts to meet internal demand. In 1963, following the failure of Khrushchev’s risky campaign to grow grain on arid steppe land to the east, the Soviet Union had to import grain.Footnote ¹³⁰ Soviet grain imports continued, and not just in bad years. Two Kansas agronomists noted: ‘In 1972, Russia purchased 400 million bushels of hard red winter wheat from the United States … Most of this grain was a blend of modern varieties, the offspring of the original Turkey brought here from Russia long ago.’Footnote ¹³¹ This was an ironic testament of the extent to which the development of wheat cultivation on the Great Plains had followed in the Russians’ steps.