History of Agronomy

Agronomy's Home for 52 Years Lilly Hall of Life Sciences

By Kelly Delp (adapted from Fred Patterson's Glimpses of History)

Constructing the Lilly Hall of Life Sciences was a long process that took about 10 years to complete.

Originally, Indiana Crop Improvement approached the state legislature to request a new building for Agronomy. Purdue President Frederick Hovde’s reaction was to expand the university’s plans for the new Life Sciences building. The concept was that by housing them together in one building, there would be more interactions among the different facilities in plant, animal, and soil sciences.

J.B. Peterson, who became Head of Agronomy in 1948, reviewed plans for the new Life Sciences building and thought it would be too small. His influence helped increase the space by about 50 percent. The first, second, and third floors of the west wing were completed in the original contract. The ground and basement floors in the west and east wing were completed with grant funds, mostly from Eli Lilly and Company, hence the name change from the Life Sciences Building to Lilly Hall of Life Sciences.

Lilly Hall of Life Sciences is 426 feet wide, 520 feet long, and originally had 750 rooms. The basement, ground, and three floors have 499,877 square feet. The west and east wings are separate, free-standing units joined by aluminum slip joint thresholds.

The west wing was built first. Construction began in 1951 and Agronomy moved into it in 1955. Construction on the main entrance began in 1957 and Biology and Animal Sciences moved into the east wing in 1959.

The completed building was dedicated with a symposium June 16-18, 1960. The Symposium, “Growth in Living Systems,” covered three areas:

1. Molecules, viruses, and bacterial
2. Cells, tissues and organisms
3. Plant growth and plant communities.

There were 35 distinguished national and international scholars who made presentations, including Francis H.C. Crick from Cambridge University, of later DNA fame.

A Purdue newsreel from 1958-1959 explains the mural in the main entryway.

“The aluminum and walnut mural in the main lobby symbolizes scientific interest in living things and the interrelated specialties needed to solve the mysteries of life.” The mural was created by Adolph Wolter from Indianapolis.

Interesting Fact

Every new building has its share of quirks to work out, and the Lilly Hall of Life Sciences was no exception.

When Agronomy moved into the building in 1955, faculty and staff found that some office door locks were installed incorrectly. Those who went into an office and shut the door without unlocking it got locked into the office. Luckily, there was room under the door to slide a key.

Learn more on ACRE's website:

History of ACRE

A History of Climatology at Purdue University

By Ken Scheeringa (June 28th, 2007)

The roots of the climatology program at Purdue run very deep. In 1884 Henry Huston, Indiana State Chemist and Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) staff member, organized the Indiana Weather Service, one of only three such state programs in existence at the time. He directed the service for several years and is regarded as the “father” of Indiana’s cooperative observer network.

In 1896 Huston enlisted the help of the new Indiana Section of the USDA Climate and Crop Service of the Weather Bureau to publish the observers’ data in a monthly bulletin. The Weather Bureau integrated the Indiana Weather Service into the federal program and soon, similar weather networks were established in other states.

Huston was an observer, setting up the Purdue weather station on the south grounds of the AES building. He was observer even after being named Director of AES and served until he left Purdue in 1903. The next two Indiana State Chemists, William Jones (1903-1917), and E. Proulx (1917-1925), also were station observers. After that, AES Farm Director Harry Reed then took data until 1939, followed by Thomas Hall (1939) and George Lehman (1939-1953) of the Ag Chemistry Department.

In 1949 new Agronomy professor, Jim Newman, required weather data for his corn hybrid testing program. The station thermometers had been relocated to the AES building’s roof in 1916 but the rain gauge remained at ground level. Newman expressed dismay that the thermometers were unrepresentative of ground conditions and unsuitable for field comparisons. In 1953 he recommended relocating the weather station to the Purdue Agronomy Farm. The AES Director turned over the weather station to Newman, who relocated the station east of the Agronomy Farm buildings.

In 1973 a supplementary automated version of the station was designed at Purdue for this location and was possibly the first microprocessor-based weather station in the world at the time. The weather station
remained there until 1987 when it was moved to its current location away from the building area. Weather observers at the Agronomy Farm have included Jimmy Martin (1953-1978), Lamar Biggs (1979-1987), Jeff Fields (1987-1999), and Steve Zachariah (1999-present).

In 1953 the Weather Bureau announced a new federally funded state climatologist program. Through his work on the AES NC-26 technical committee, Newman was able to gain approval for a new state
climatologist position in the Purdue Agronomy Department. Larry Schaal, the first Indiana State Climatologist, arrived in January 1956. Analysis of climate data for publication, response to data requests, and a greatly expanded Indiana Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin were important accomplishments of the new state climate program. That work included placing all past Indiana climate records on more than 2 million IBM punch cards.

In 1958 Newman began teaching courses in agricultural meteorology and climatology, completing the triangle of teaching, research, and extension in the climatology program. That same year Congress
authorized a new agricultural weather service. After testing the concept in a few southern states, Congress expanded the new service to Indiana. In 1966 Walt Stirm began the service as the new agricultural advisory meteorologist for Indiana in cooperation with two agricultural weather forecasters at the Indianapolis Weather Bureau. The premier product of the new service was twice daily agricultural weather advisories released to news media and the public based on weather data collected from a statewide agricultural weather station subnetwork.

At Purdue more positions followed. In 1967 Newman worked on a university committee to secure four meteorology teaching positions in the Department of Geosciences, along with two new climatology
positions in Agronomy. Bob Dale arrived in Agronomy in 1967 to teach statistical climatology while micrometeorologist Roger Shaw came in 1972. Paw U [needs source] replaced Shaw in 1980.

In the 1970s Congress merged the state advisory services into regional centers, and in 1977 Agronomy began hosting the federal Midwestern Agricultural Weather Service Center (MAWSC) to serve Indiana,
Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and the Missouri boot heel. Original staff members were Walt Stirm, Warren Bruns, Albert Peterlin, and Jim McIntyre. Others who served later included John Kotke, Jim
Daniels, Jeff Andresen, Jeff Logan, and John Wright. In 1995 MAWSC was terminated at Purdue when the National Weather Service closed the centers to fund other projects.

Federal support of the state climatologist program was terminated in 1973. The Indiana position was continued half time by Purdue. Larry Schaal continued until Newman was appointed to the Purdue position in 1978.

Newman was state climatologist for ten years, retiring in 1988. Ken Scheeringa was then appointed by Agronomy as Acting State Climatologist, continuing in this role for 17 years. Scheeringa had joined
Agronomy in 1974 as research agronomist under Dale. In 1977 Scheeringa became meteorology assistant to Newman and the MAWSC staff, and later worked for Rich Grant in the Applied Meteorology Group in the 1980s and 1990s.

Dev Niyogi was appointed Indiana State Climatologist when he joined the Agronomy Department in 2005. Today, climatology is enjoying a resurgence at Purdue as Niyogi has implemented a vigorous land surface processes research and climatology services program.

Sources:
Professor Jim Newman
Annual Report of the Purdue Agricultural Experiment Station (1890-1939)
Purdue Debris (1891-1900)
Faculty and Staff Roster (1970-1982)
WSSRD – online cooperative station histories
The History of Indiana Agriculture Weather Program

Learn more about current climatology research on the website for the Midwest Regional Climate Center.

MRCC Website

Small Grains Breeding at Purdue University

By Herb Ohm & Bill McFee

The first project approved by the Purdue Board of Trustees in 1880 was for testing wheat varieties. In 1900, in the 12th Annual Report of the Indiana Agriculture Experiment Station (W.C. Latta) summarized 19 years of testing wheat cultivars in Indiana.

Fred Patterson, leader of small grains breeding program at Purdue from 1950 to 1986, provided much of the information in this summary from his research and memory. He had learned that Purdue sent Martin L. Fisher and another person, we are not sure who, to Minnesota in 1904 to learn the techniques for making wheat crosses from W.M. Hays. Fisher likely started making crosses soon thereafter and was appointed the Purdue Agriculture Experiment Station’s plant breeder in 1915. When he left Agronomy to become Dean of Men in 1926 he was replaced by Dr. G.H. Cutler, who released cultivars of clover and soybeans as well as wheat.

It became apparent that plant breeding would be of little value unless some means were provided to protect the purity of newly developed cultivars. In 1919, the International Crop Improvement Association was created at the International Hay and Grain Show where G.I. Christie, Purdue’s first director of Extension, was superintendent. G.H. Cutler, later to be associate head of Agronomy at Purdue, was elected first vice president of the association. According to Keller Beeson, M.L. Fisher became a moving spirit in the organization and a missionary to get the seed certification program widely accepted and was instrumental in Beeson's election as secretary-treasurer in 1929 and as president in 1930. Seed certification was introduced in 1920 by the Indiana Corn Growers Association in cooperation with Purdue. Under Beeson's tutelage and leadership, with help from M.O. Pence and other agronomists, certification rapidly took hold in Indiana and farmers began to place more and more faith in experiment station varieties. Beeson was secretary-treasurer of the Indiana Crop Improvement Association, which superseded the Indiana Corn Growers Association, from 1928 until his retirement in 1962.

Early emphasis in wheat breeding, encouraged by several severe winters, was placed on winter hardiness. The winter of 1928, for example, resulted in the loss of 66 percent of the planted wheat acreage in Indiana. Fisher’s work produced Michikof (1920) and Purkof (1924), cultivars with excellent winter hardiness, but with gluten contents too high to be suitable for use in pastry flour blends. Resistance to Hessian fly was a concern from the beginning and was the subject of the first report of the experiment station. E.B. Mains and H.S. Jackson at Purdue began developing cultivars resistant to leaf rust, caused by the fungus Puccinia recondita, in 1926. From their genetic studies, Mains, C.E. Leighty, and C.O. Johnston determined how leaf rust resistance was inherited. Identifying sources of leaf rust resistance became a major part of the Purdue wheat program. Cutler was brought to Purdue in 1926 to concentrate on the gluten problem. With the support of Igleheart Mills, the Southwestern Indiana Wheat Improvement Association was established in the late 1930s to support a special Extension effort that continued into the 1960s. Igleheart worked with Purdue to produce the cultivar, Newstar, which gave a strong yield of high quality flour.

Paralleling the Agronomy wheat program aimed at lodging resistance, cold resistance and baking quality, a program of breeding for disease resistance was conducted by Ralph Caldwell and LeRoy Compton (USDA-ARS) in the department of Botany and Plant Pathology. As Cutler approached retirement, Agronomy considered dropping out of the cereal breeding program, and concentrating on forage crops. When Associate Director Norman Volk, gave J. B. Peterson, head of Agronomy, permission to screen for a smallgrains geneticist, Peterson approached Caldwell, head of Botany and Plant Pathology, who was also screening for a small grains breeder, about the possibility of pooling resources in a joint  program. The plan was accepted and put into effect with Peterson hiring F.L. Patterson in 1950, and Caldwell hiring J.F. Schafer in 1952. Caldwell, Compton, Patterson and Schafer developed extensive research collaborations, and the Small Grains Research Program became eminently successful, especially in the area of soft red winter wheat where it dominated in the eastern United States from the 1950s through the 1980s. In the 1970s, more than 80 percent of the soft red winter wheat acreage in the United States were planted to wheat developed at Purdue.

Beginning in the 1940s and early 1950s, research expanded to winter barley, and winter and spring oats. Winter oat research was discontinued after the release of cultivar Norline in 1960. Winter barley research was discontinued after the release of cultivar Pike in 1976. Although several successful cultivars were released, winter barley and oat production moved to areas south of Indiana due to limited winter hardiness. Research on improvement of spring oats was expanded beginning in the late 1960s due to the continuing threat of crown rust and stem rust and the emerging threat of barley yellow dwarf virus.

In the 1950s, the average yield of soft winter wheat in Indiana was 28 bushels per acre at a time when the nursery plots yielded about 50 bushels, with several selections going higher than 65 bushels. A majority of the new strains were resistant to leaf rust, loose smut, soilborne mosaic, and Hessian fly. Examples are Knox (1953) and Vermillion (1955), the first of the early maturing wheats for the Ohio River valley area. Knox provided about a 25 percent advance in yield, a new level of excellence in quality, and was a widely-used parent line for developing early-maturing wheat cultivars, and resistance to leaf rust. In 1959, 96 percent of the oats and 88 percent of the wheat grown in Indiana were of varieties developed in the Purdue-USDA cooperative small grains research program. In 1961, Knox was the most widely grown soft winter wheat in the United States.

An oat program begun in 1940 by this same interdepartmental team resulted in outstanding improvements in lodging resistance, disease resistance, and adaptation to the warm temperature conditions in Indiana. After 1954, six spring oat varieties were distributed, including Clintland, Bentland, Newton, Putnam, Clintland 60, and Putnam 61. These varieties made up a substantial part of the oats grown in the North Central region.

After Caldwell retired in 1970, the cooperative program continued under the leadership of Patterson (who retired in 1986), Herb Ohm (started in 1970), and D. M. Huber and G.E. Shaner in Botany and Plant Pathology. Huber concentrated on root and crown rot diseases and their interactions with nitrogen form and level, and Shaner focused on foliar diseases. Hari Sharma, cytogeneticist, was added to the team in the eighties to focus on the transfer of resistance to barley yellow dwarf virus from wheatgrass into wheat.

Recent history of the Small Grains Program will be continued in a future article. Excellent soft winter wheat and spring oat cultivars continue to be developed, and there has been a transition to releasing wheat cultivars under licensing agreements by Ag Alumni Seed. There is increased emphasis on genetics research, DNA marker development for specific genes and traits, and marker-assisted selection. Also, the USDA-ARS component of the collaborative research program has been significantly strengthened.

From Bogus Soils to Web Soil Survey

By Darrell Schulze

"Sir: For many years, numerous requests have been received from landowners in northern and northwestern Indiana that the Bureau of Soils investigate the characteristics and properties of drained lands, and particularly of a certain class of lands known locally as 'bogus' soils."

- Soil Survey of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, 1906

Soil surveying began in Indiana in 1902 with field work for Posey County. Lead by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with the Indiana State Department of Geology, the work was done using time-consuming plane table surveying techniques, often by workers with more training in geology than soils. The maps, soil descriptions, and interpretations were simple by current standards, but reflected the state of the art of the time. The well-worn copies of early soil surveys in the Agronomy Department archives, attest to their importance in the teaching, research, and extension missions of the Department during its early years.

In 1919, the Agricultural Experiment Station became the cooperator with the USDA, and in 1921, Thomas M. Bushnell joined the Agronomy Department as head of soil survey activities. Bushnell’s innovations affected soil survey not only in Indiana, but nationally. He was a member of the committee that standardized the description of soil colors using the Munsell system still used today. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in soil mapping, and as a result, Jennings County, Indiana became the first in the United States to be mapped solely on aerial photographs. He incorporated Milne’s catena concept into a taxonomy of Indiana soils, published in 1944 as the Story of Indiana Soils.

Soil surveys became more accurate, detailed, and useful as advances in mapping and concepts of soil developed in concert with better approaches to soil use and management. Sections on soil management written by Alfred T. Wiancko, the Agronomy Department’s first Head, and Samuel D. Conner, the Department’s first chemist, began appearing in surveys in 1919.

Herbert P. Ulrich became the second leader of the soil survey program for the AES in 1951. He and Harry H. Galloway, land use extension specialist, introduced estimated crop yields, tables of use and management, block diagrams relating soils and topography, and the first general soil association maps in published soil survey reports.

A few years after Donald P. Franzmeier became the third leader of the AES soil survey program in 1970, Indiana embarked on an accelerated soil survey program as a result of a requirement that soil survey information be used to evaluate farmland for tax assessment. By 1986, all counties had been mapped to modern standards by soil scientists supported by federal, state, and county funds. Franzmeier emphasized research to support the work of the field soil scientists, particularly in understanding the relationship between measured soil water tables and soil morphology. He also was instrumental in the establishment of a professional registration program, the Indiana Registry of Soil Scientists. After completion of the accelerated soil survey, emphasis shifted to detailed, site-specific investigations for the permitting of on-site waste disposal systems led by Joseph E. Yahner, extension specialist in nonagricultural soil uses. In the ’60s and ’70s, Alvin L. Zachary led many surveys, taught soil classification, genesis and survey, and coached soil judging teams.

Our current faculty continue the long cooperative relationship the Agronomy Department has had with the National Soil Survey Program, now administered by the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

Soil survey continues to change with the times. In January of this year, digital soil survey data for all of Indiana became available from NRCS. With a few clicks of a mouse, anyone can access soil survey information for any part of the state via the Internet and Web Soil Survey (http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov). Our students learn from this vast digital database in new and exciting ways by studying soil maps displayed on rugged Table PCs on their laps while they are in the field studying soils and landscapes first hand.

The landowners who wanted more information on their “bogus” soils, soils that were unproductive because they were too wet, deficient in potassium, or highly acidic, could never have imagined where more than100 years of soil survey would lead.