from Ken Kephart, 2/93
 
                 Commercial Wheat Cultivars of the United States
                           Gopher Database Version 1.1
                            Kenneth D. Kephart, Ph.D.
                         Assistant Professor of Agronomy
                         University of Missouri-Columbia
 
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      "History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but
      scorns the plowed fields whereby we thrive.  It knows the names of the
      King's bastard children, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.  That
      is the way of human folly..."
                                                            Jean Henri Fabre
                                         French Entomologist and Philosopher
                                                                   1823-1915
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      Introduction:
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      The production of wheat in the North America dates back to the
      arrival of the Europeans who first colonized this continent, bringing
      with them the seed of the crops necessary for their survival in the
      new world.  Until the late 1800's, wheat production in the United
      States was based on the landrace cultivars introduced by colonist and
      immigrants.  With the knowledge of genetics and modern plant breeding
      techniques, public and private wheat breeding programs have replaced
      the landrace cultivars during the past century with modern cultivars.
      This compendium was developed from a database containing reference
      information on over 1,600 distinct cultivars that have been commercial
      produced in the United States during the past 100 to 150 years.  While
      every effort has been made to make this compendium as comprehensive as
      possible, some information is not available for certain cultivars.
 
      To search the Commercial Wheat Cultivars database, select menu option
      #2.  A text box will appear, prompting you to type a search word.  The 
      indexing strategy used provides pointers to each word that occurs in 
      all of the records.  Selection for a particular cultivar name will 
      retrieve all records that possess that name regardless of where it
      occurs in the document files.  Multiple records will be retrieved for
      searches where a particular cultivar appears in the pedigree of other 
      cultivars or may have been named as a check cultivar in registration
      statements.  The reserved words "and" and "not' facilitate Boolean
      searches.  Quotation marks are used to group hyphenated or multiple 
      words into search phrases (e.g. "CV-100", "Norin 10 / Brevor").  Use 
      of the asterisk "*" as the last character of a search word provides 
      wild card searches (e.g. "Car*" locates "Carleton", "Cardon", 
      "Carson", "Cardinal", etc.).  Selected records can be mailed to any 
      valid Internet address or saved as text files on local host 
      directories.  Updates, new records and additional information will be
      added to newer versions of the database as new information sources
      become available.
 
      Version 1.1 (6/93):
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      The reference to "Appendix A" in the "About References" section has
      been eliminated.  Full citation list is now available for browsing by
      selecting menu option #16, "Full Reference Listing".  Saving this
      section to a file requires approximately 135K of free disk space.
      Column headers of Table 1 in "About Place of Origin" section are 
      repeated every 20 lines.  Tree diagramns of example pedigrees added
      to aid interpretation of Purdy system nomenclature.