ISSUE 97, WHEAT, Part 4: Fulcaster Wheat

Fulcaster Wheat

The greatest winter wheat variety bred in the final quarter of the 19^th century, Fulcaster came into being as an inbred cross between Fulz and Lancaster Wheats. The eight row head, excellent straw quality, and chaff of the Fultz blended with the hardiness, long awns, grains, and big berry of the Lancaster.

Fulcaster was created by Schindel and Company of Hagerstown, MD, in the the mid-1880s. 1886 was the first year of extensive release of seed in the Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio area. As with most grain introductions (oats particularly), con men exploited the credulity and enthusiasm of grain farmers, and one particular swindler exploited the buzz about Fulcaster and had farmers signing notes for Fulcaster seed at exorbitant prices. The virtues of Fulcaster wheat in times eclipsed all bad associations in the public mind. It ceased being “fool’s wheat.”

What were the grain’s telling qualities—the things that distinguished it from its parents and other winter wheats of the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries. First of all, the size and regularity of the grain heads. The berries were hong, large, and evenly order in 8 rows. The grains were tightly bound in light colored chaff and protected from insects and birds by long spiked awns. The stiff white straw held up well in windy, stormy weather. These features became signatures of hardiness, and the wheat became explosively popular, being grown extensively in Kansas and Michigan by 1890.

The tendency was to plant the wheat from September 15 to October 1. While advertisements hyped a yield of 48 bushels per acre, the average growth averaged over the years tended by to in the mid-20s depending on rainfall. The crop generated revenue for both grain and straw, both commanding consistent demand. Millers smiled upon Fulcaster because of the regularity of the seed heads, the relative absence of insect-marred grain (tight chaff!), and the easy millability. Middling productivity became the one dimension of the wheat that caused pause among growers. Fulcaster would be supplanted as a commodity wheat in the mid-20^th century by varieties that shared its hardiness, regularity, and straw quality but produced substantially more bushels per acre.

In the early 20th century grain processors changed their attitude concerning awns, no longer valuing them as nature’s inhibitor of birds and insects. Instead, they became bothersome material inhibiting grain processing. By the 1920s an awnless version of Fulcaster became available to American grain farmers. Several heads of this variety are featured in the illustration heading this article.

One dimension of the wheat was never bettered by mid-20^th century grain breeders, the handsomeness of the seed head. Its tidiness, size, and shape fixed itself as the model of what a winter wheat should look like. There remained a sect of devotees into the 21^st century who grew Fulcaster because it raised the best looking field of grain in one’s region. It inspired field envy among those whose imaginations were fired by wheat.