ISSUE 99, GREAT PLANT BREEDERS, Part 2: Allan Norden, Mr. Peanut

Allan James Norden (1924-1994)

It is a curious turn of providence that a boy raised in a logging district in Michigan’s upper peninsula should become the twentieth century’s most consequential peanut breeder. Allan Norden belonged to that generation of young men who reached draft age during midst of World War II. An infantryman, he was shipped to Europe at age 18 and suffered extensive wounding during the Battle of the Bulge. He returned to his unit rather than be discharged with a disability. The G.I. Bill enabled him to enroll in Michigan State’s College of Agriculture. He graduated with a B.S. and immediately enrolled in the M.A. program.

He worked as a county ag agent for two years, but his ambition was to serve the wider world. He took his Ph.D. in plant breeding at Iowa State University and after completion of his dissertation was hired in 1958 by the University of Florida.

Though the peanut was not the focus of his graduate work, his grasp of the theory and method of trait-based plant breeding would enable him to shift species. The University of Florida had created the first academic program in peanut breeding in 1928, and considered the improvement of that crop a central part of the institution’s agricultural mission. They believed Dr. Norden had the insight and knowledge to create the peanuts of the future. Their faith would bring dividends.

Several things stand out about Norden’s peanut work: at a time when many grain and vegetable breeders abandoned sensory testing of their creations, Norden focused on peanut flavor. He shifted the chemical content of the peanut seeds, increasing the amount of oil in the kernels. Indeed his discovery of the high oleic trait in peanuts insured longer lasting, fresher tasting peanuts in the subsequent decades. In 1969 Norden released (with William Carver and R. W. Lipscomb) the Florunner peanut. It proved a sensation. Runner peanuts grow horizontally forming mats with their vines. Because of this low habit they were reckoned difficult to harvest, but the taste, productivity, earliness to maturity, and prolific setting of nuts won the Florunner immense respect. Because of higher productivity (20% more peanuts per harvest) It supplanted the Valencias, Spanish, and Virginia types in the field, and to the shock of industry people, captured the peanut butter market. Norden’s attention to peanut flavor won the tongues of bulk buyers. Florunner would rule as boss peanut of the 1970s and it reigned until the extensive monoculture led to a crisis.

Actually there were two crises: Florunner’s productivity led to a price crisis. In 1968 the average yield per acre of crop peanuts was 1,650 lbs. The Florunner pushed yields to a little over 3,000 lbs. by the mid-1970s. [[Galen Moses, ,”Peanut researcher as been almost too Successful,” Gainesville Sun (September 26, 1982), 13]. The excess of peanuts caused prices to drop while the costs of planting the crop climbed. Some farmers went into the red. The second crisis is that which plagues every successful monoculture crop. Sooner or later a pest or pathogen that favors that crop more than any other shows up and an agronomic disaster takes place. The florunner covered vast acreage and when the Western Flower thrip arrived in the late 1980s, the spread of tomato spotted wilt virus was explosive.

The Florunner’s vulnerability to the wilt virus was so great that some prophesied the collapse of the American peanut industry. Norden’s colleague at U of Florida, the plant pathologist Dr. Dan Gorbet bred the wilt resistant forms of runner peanuts now found in fields throughout the South. The most recent disease resistant form of Norden’s peanut is FloRun 725, released in 2024, with the classic rich flavor and fulsome mouth field. Like all high oleic varieties in the wake of Norden’s innovation, this FloRun peanut does not lose flavor or texture with long storage on the home shelf.

Norden bred peanuts besides Florunner during his career. The medium size of the Florunner nuts did not make it a first choice snacking peanut, so he crossed it with the larger Virginia peanut, creating Sunrunner, released in 1981. The Sunrunner had greater oil content and protein than the Florunner, but cost more to plant.

Norden’s familiarity with the genetics of Virginia peanuts arose from the development of an early-maturing bush habit Virginia type, the Early Bunch Peanut, This became the one widely planted Virginia peanut in the deep South.

Norden retired in 1987, his last project being breeding a Valencia “green peanut” for boiling entitled F623. In a speech the following year, marking the 60^th anniversary of the peanut breeding program at Florida, he emphasized that breeders did not do their work in isolation; they particularly needed the input of plant pathologists and entomologists. The creation of successful new cultivars was a communal enterprise. [Thornton Hartley, “UF’s Peanut Breeding Program,” Jacksonville Florida Times-Union (August 29, 1988), 12].

In the 1970s Norden was swept up in the running craze that spread on University campuses. It contributed to his aura as a capable, disciplined, and public-facing academic, able to speak with farmers, politicians, scientists, and bankers with ease. He died in 1994 and was survived by his wife Catherine and six children. There was no more consequential peanut breeder in 20th-century America than Allan Norden.