ISSUE 99, GREAT PLANT BREEDERS, Part 7: W. Carroll Barnes & the Cucumber

W. Carroll Barnes (190?-1973)

Every summer mildew began its northward march from Florida into the vegetable fields of Georgia and South Carolina. Mildew plagued numbers of crops, none more so than cucumbers. Dr. W. C. Barnes of Clemson’s Truck Farming Experimental Station in Charleston dutifully told 1950’s newspaper reports that administering a copper-based poison was the most effective way to prevent crop spoilage. As the years passed this sort of advice galled him. As head of Clemson’s Station in Charleston, Barnes had come to think broadly about all aspects of farming. In the late 1940s he had taken up the study of soil and water, and realized that repeated recourse to chemical herbicides and pesticides were causing soil and water to become increasingly toxic.

Yet the farmers needed something to inhibit the waves of pests and pathogens that invaded the southern countryside. Anyone with ample acreage devoted to a cash crop was particularly vulnerable. Barnes determined that disease resistance and pest resistance had to be bred into a cultivar, not sprayed on it. He began collaborating with plant pathologists and learned that branch of agriculture himself. When he began in the late 1950s, no cucumber had resistance to more than two diseases. He ranged wide in cucumber genetics to secure the alleles that insured viability in southern fields for the cucumber. He was a classical breeder, hand pollinating cucurbit blossoms with pollen from others with desirable traits.

The market recognizes two categories of cucumbers: slicers (salad cucumbers) and pickling cucumbers (squat cukes for whole pickling or chipping). Pickle manufacturers bought in bulk, were decisive, and well financed. Barnes first work would be to create a pickling cucumber that had mildew and anthracnose resistance: Pixie. In subsequent releases he added resistance to more diseases. Chipper would become for a time the dominant sweet pickle chip variety. Yet Barnes’s greatest contributions to cucumber breeding would be with slicers. In particular the Poinsett with its four disease resistance became a line that the breeding community embraced.

Since its introduction in 1965 has had multiple versions, each with more disease resistance. For back yard gardeners and commercial growers the Poinsett cucumber is a no-worry choice. Those more concerned with salad cucumber aesthetics—the quality of body, crispness, compactness of the seed chamber, mitigation of bitterness, Barnes’s Ashley cucumber remains a cherished variety. By the late 1960s and early 70s, Barnes’s cucumbers had earned him every award of consequence in the world of American agriculture, except the All American Selection.

Barnes did not restrict his breeding efforts to cucumbers. His disease resistant Parris Island Romaine Lettuce is particularly suited to the south, having inbred inhibitions on quick bolting. His last efforts (1969-72) involved breeding turnips that repelled aphids.

In the post World War II period too many American breeders of grains and vegetables became intent to creating things that could be grown on industrial scale. Public breeding at universities bought into this vision. Barnes went against the grain. He saw too clearly the regretable consequences of industrial growing—its dependence on chemical supplementation packages—its growing fixation on sterilizing soil. Barnes may have been the first scientist of consequence in South Carolina who used the term pollution to describe the wreckage of the common landscape with industrial and agricultural chemicals. A devout Presbyterian Christian, Barnes held to a strong sense of stewardship of the earth. He took the time to think through the consequences of what he was making. When he retired in 1972, his first project was to go to Africa to share knowledge of plant breeding for disease resistance with African plant people. He was planning a similar trip to Brazil in 1973 when he died.

A native of Brunson, SC, he took his B.S, in plant breeding at Clemson and a Ph.D. at Cornell University. He maintained a strong connection with Cornell over the years, sending students there, and hiring graduates of that department. He believed in scientific collaboration and public access to plant resources. He also believed that a sense of humor was at times the only relief to the accidents of weather, unanticipated infestation, and labor screw ups that plagued the life of farmers. He was a man who laughed easily and sincerely.