ISSUE 99, GREAT PLANT BREEDERS, Part 10: George J. Raleigh, Lettuce Savant

George J. Raleigh (1898-1982)

Sometimes the legacies of influential plant breeders can be complicated. I think of Dr. George J. Raleigh, whose work upon lettuce from the 1940s through the 1960s, proved central to the welfare of vegetable farmers in the northern United States. His Buttercrunch Bibb lettuce, an All America Selection medalist, enabled summer lettuce crops to flourish without heat wilt or bolting.

For a plant geneticist of the id-20^th century he had a surprising depth of practical knowledge about growing. He studied how the mineral composition of soils caused plants to thrive or languish. He attended particularly to the role of boron (for beets and cauliflowers) and calcium (tomatoes) in plant development. He was an early adherent of organic farming, having embraced the insights of Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament (1940), and championed the enrichment of living soil in farming. One hallmark of his breeding was that he created vegetables with ramified root systems that could extract maximum nutrition from the soil.

In the post-World War II era of American agriculture, it became apparent that farm labor would operate differently that it did in earlier ages. The age of the tractor and combine had dawned, and tasks that used to be performed by hand and hoe were undertaken with internal combustion engines. He thought weeding necessary for farming, be too labor intensive, so he became a vocal advocate of herbicides in field crops. Because he interacted with many farmers directly in New York (he was a professor at Cornell), the spread of chemical weed killers occurred rapidly in the 1940s. This of course was a mixed blessing. The recourse to chemical poisons led to increasing toxicity of the agricultural landscape in the subsequent 70 years.

A native of Kansas, he received his B.S. from Kansas State in 1922. He took a Ph.D. in botany from the University of Chicago in 1928. His interest in soil chemistry and plants led to his employment by Swift & Co., in its fertilizer division. He worked there four years before accepting appointment as assistant professor at Cornell. There he worked on soil interactions with onions, celery, and lettuce. He became convinced he could breed lettuce with a greater capacity to extract nutrition from the soil, while breeding heat tolerance, some diseases resistance, and superior texture. His cultivar (created jointly with the USDA) 456 lettuce “literally saved the New York lettuce industry in the early 1940s.”

Both his Buttercrunch and Summer Bibb lettuces possessed traits that appealed both to growers and consumers. The growers loved the field performance in the summer heats. The consumers loved the mouth feel and tender leaves. They were the definitive lettuce varieties of the 1960s, and buttercrunch won the All America Selection for 1962.

One of the charges laid against the All American Selections in the latter decades of the twentieth century was that they became fixated upon eye appeal rather than flavor or texture when consumed. The buttercrunch’s merits did not lie in its distinctive appearance. Oh it was tidier than the classic limestone Bibb, but it was not a “show lettuce” meant to rivet eyes on the produce stand.

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This concludes my ten profiles of plant breeders whose memories should be preserved. There are more, numbers of them living, who deserve our regard. In the future I will devote an issue to persons currently in the forefront of plant breeding.