The seed that changed Canada’s wheat industry

For more than a century, Canadian wheat has been sold, promoted and exported around one virtue: it produces top quality flour and bread.

Thanks to breeding innovations and good fortune, Canadian wheat has set the global standard for high-quality milling wheat for about 120 years. The strong relationship between Canadian wheat and high quality, however, has a story that doesn’t progress in a straight line.

It likely began in a forgotten region of the world called Galicia, where farmers in the 1800s grew a wheat variety that would eventually became famous in North America.

“Canadian wheats are still known (today) for having good baking quality,” said George Fedak, a retired cereal crop breeder who worked for Agriculture Canada and the federal government for more than 50 years. “That (quality) traces back to Red Fife.”

The origin story of Red Fife, a wheat variety popular in America and Canada in the latter half of the 1800s, is a bit cloudy. There are different versions, all connected to a farmer from Peterborough, Ont., named David Fife.

The basic narrative goes something like this:

David Fife was seeking a better variety of wheat because what was available in Canada at the time wasn’t working on his farm. He had a friend or possibly a family member in Glasgow, Scotland. A cargo ship was docked in Glasgow in 1841, which was unloading wheat from a port in what is now Poland. The friend obtained some of that wheat seed and sent it to Fife.

“David (Fife) planted this in his garden and most of it was winter wheat, (but) one plant came up as spring wheat,” said Fedak, who retired in 2021 but continues to work part-time at the Agriculture Canada research centre in Ottawa.

The seeds from that single plant in Fife’s garden became the source for Red Fife, a wheat known for producing high quality flour and bread.

“This famous wheat, commonly known as Red Fife or Scotch Fife in North America, is called ‘red’ because that is its colour when fully ripe and ‘Fife’ after David Fife,” says an 85-page Agriculture Canada document entitled “From a Single Seed – Tracing the Marquis Wheat Success Story in Canada to its Roots in the Ukraine.”

The Agriculture Canada document, published in 2015, was penned by Stephan Symko, a Ukrainian who immigrated to Canada after the Second World War with his wife and four children.

Symko worked as an agricultural scientist in Ukraine and in 1949 he took a job in cereal breeding and research at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa. He remained there until his retirement in 1976.

At the beginning of his career, Fedak and Symko were colleagues at the Ottawa research station.

“He was a very patriotic Ukrainian,” Fedak told the National Post in 2022. “Working in the same building as Steve, that sort of rubs off on you after a while.”

Symko was a man of many passions, among them a keen interest in history. He was convinced that the cargo of wheat that arrived in Glasgow in 1841 was grown in Ukraine.

Further, the seeds collected from that ship by Fife’s friend was a spring wheat variety known in Eastern Europe for producing exceptional flour and bread.

In his retirement and while at Agriculture Canada, Symko spent a massive amount of time researching the origins of Red Fife wheat and what it meant for the development of Western Canada.

As he explained in his Agriculture Canada paper “From a Single Seed,” the wheat varieties grown from the 1810s to 1840s were not suited for the Prairies. The Selkirk settlers in what is now Manitoba and other pioneers couldn’t produce consistent yields.

“The quality of spring wheat in the early part of the nineteenth century was poor. This created a problem,” he wrote.

“The Canadian climate was not always favourable for the cultivation of winter wheat, which in any case was often attacked by diseases like rust, which would destroy some or all of the crop. There were no varieties of wheat that could meet the growing season requirements of Canada’s climate.”

There was an opportunity for a variety like Red Fife to fill the void, but that didn’t happen until the latter part of the 19th century.

The wheat variety gained success in America before it came to Western Canada. Symko isn’t sure what happened after 1842, when Fife first grew the variety on his Ontario farm, but in 1860 a Wisconsin farmer named J.W. Clarke harvested a bumper crop of Red Fife that produced 36 bushels per acre.

Clarke wrote a letter to a the “Country Gentleman and Cultivator magazine describing his success and recommending this new variety of wheat to all farmers,” Symko said.

“Soon after Clarke’s article appeared in 1860, Red Fife was being grown in Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.”

A Canadian magazine republished the letter in 1861, promoting the yield and baking qualities of the wheat variety.

However, Western Canada wasn’t ready for Red Fife. It was still nine years before Manitoba became a province and cultivated land was a rarity on the Prairies.

It wasn’t until the 1880s and 1990s that thousands of immigrants arrived to start farms in Western Canada.

According to Symko’s research, the popularity of Red Fife exploded in the 1880s. A Manitoba farmer imported seed from America and harvested a fantastic crop in 1882.

“At the Winnipeg Fair he received first prize from the CPR and the HBC (Hudson Bay Company) for the 10 best bushels of wheat,” Symko wrote.

The publicity helped establish the reputation of Red Fife in Western Canada. In turn, the federal government and Canadian Pacific Railway encouraged farmers to use it.

“The government permitted farms to import Red Fife into Canada duty-free. The CPR also helped the farmers by allowing them to transport (it) free of charge,” Symko said.

“The result was that after 1882, Red Fife displaced all other varieties such as Club, Golden Drop and White Russian. Red Fife became the standard variety of wheat in Western Canada…. Its top grade, Manitoba No. 1 Hard, commanded the highest price on the British markets.”

In 2008, two Agriculture Canada wheat breeders — Brent McCallum and Ron DePauw — published an article on the history of wheat cultivars grown in Western Canada.

Red Fife had excellent end-use quality, but serious drawbacks, they wrote, “including late maturity, which made it subject to frost damage, susceptibility to lodging, a tendency to shatter, and susceptibility to stem rust.”

In the 1890s, Canadian ag scientists understood the limitations of Red Fife and set out to improve it. Sir Charles Saunders and his brother A.P. Saunders solved the problem when A.P. crossed Red Fife with an Indian variety called Hard Red Calcutta.

Charles Saunders tested and selected the variety, branded as Marquis.

“It was earlier maturing, shorter in stature and higher yielding than Red Fife, while still retaining the bread-making quality of Red Fife,” wrote McCallum and DePauw.

In 1905, Charles Saunders spoke to the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture in Ottawa. In that presentation, he likely discussed the development of Marquis and definitely spoke about the origins of Red Fife.

Saunders told the committee that he had recently grown and tested a wheat variety from Galacia (Ukraine), which was incredibly similar to Red Fife, Symko wrote.

“I therefore sowed it last spring alongside Red Fife and watched them both very carefully throughout the season,” Saunders said. “They proved to be identical at all stages of their growth as well as when the grain was harvested.”

When ground into flour and baked, the resulting bread was nearly identical.

The tests proved, at least to Saunders, that Red Fife and this Ukrainian variety were the same wheat. So, the wheat that arrived on David Fife’s farm in 1842 was a variety in Ukraine.

“It seems … quite clear that the kernel of wheat which came into the hands of Mr. Fife was a kernel of this Galician spring wheat, accidentally present in the cargo of winter wheat from Danzig, of which he obtained a portion.”

The story of Red Fife, the Ukraine connection and Saunders’ comments to Parliament were likely forgotten when Marquis took over and became the dominant wheat in Western Canada.

After testing at experimental farms in Brandon and Indian Head, Sask., from 1907-08, Marquis became widely available to farmers around 1911. By 1917, it was ubiquitous.

As Symko notes, the three prairie provinces produced 212 million bushels of wheat in 1917. Of that:

• 169 million bu. were Marquis, or 80 percent of the total.
• In Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana, farmers produced 184 million bu. of wheat.
• In those states, Marquis was 44 percent of the total.

In his paper, “From a Single Seed,” Symko said the development of Western Canada and the success of new immigrant farmers was directly connected to the performance of Marquis.

“This variety not only contributed to a vastly expanded wheat production but also the arrival of great numbers of immigrants … as well as the beginning of Canada’s northward expansion,” he wrote. “Canada’s wheat fields increased from 5,096,053 acres in 1906 … to 16,125,451 in 1918. By 1940 this area had expanded to 27,750,000 acres.”

For a cereal breeder like Fedak, it’s obvious that the introduction of Marquis was a pivotal event in the history of Canada.

“(It) is one of the greatest practical triumphs that Canada has ever had, one that is perennially fruitful, not impoverishing but ever increasing the wealth of our country and making it a better land to live in.”

Fedak still shares the story of Red Fife, and its origin story in Ukraine, when he has an opportunity. Recently, he met the husband of Kovaliv Yuliya, Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada.

Fedak provided documents on Red Fife and explained how a variety from western Ukraine played a critical role in Canada’s agricultural history.

It’s possible that some Canadians aren’t interested in this connection, but the story illustrates that the modern accomplishments of scientists and farmers are built upon successes and luck from 180 years ago.

“Canadian wheats are still known for having good baking quality. That traces back to Red Fife,” Fedak said. “It’s a reminder of a forgotten heritage — the importance of Red Fife wheat and its successors, including Marquis and many later varieties, to Canada’s agriculture and especially the development of the West.”

Tags: Ukraine, Canada, Bread, wheat, flour, yield, milling wheat, spring wheat