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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction: ------------ 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): ------------------ 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.