It is, then, no surprise to find that the committee included Emanuele De Cillis and Enrico Fineli. Professor De Cillis, of the Royal Institute of Agriculture of Portici (Naples), the foremost expert on methods of wheat cultivation in the southern regions of Italy, dedicated his efforts to coping with the difficult conditions of the arid regions of Apulia, Basilicata, and Calabria.[16] Fineli, a no less important figure, was head of the extended network of Cattedre ambulanti d’agricoltura, which consisted of about 500 local chairs of agriculture in charge of introducing Italian farmers to the latest developments in husbandry.[17] Each local chair was made responsible for a Commission for Granary Propaganda consisting of twelve to twenty experts recruited by the newly formed National Union of Fascist Agricultural Technicians.[18] These commissions reproduced lectures and courses for local farmers, distributed leaflets and advertisements, and cultivated demonstration fields, all in order to make the case for proper rotation, good cultivation methods, application of fertilizers, and the planting of selected seeds. Their extension work was inspired by the words of the Duce: “You, the technicians… shall awaken agricultural activity from where it was left behind by the old procedures, or accelerate it where something has already been done; you shall be the energizers reaching out everywhere, till the last village, till the last man.”[19]
But, once again, this complex propaganda structure that enabled the Fascist state to reach into the most remote spots of rural Italy was built on the promise of high yields that would be made possible by new strains of wheat. If some scientists, such as De Cillis, owed their reputations to their capacity for revealing the potential of the seeds by experimenting with cultivation techniques, others, such as Nazareno Strampelli (another member of the Permanent Wheat Committee), were hailed as the creators of the new strains. Strampelli was by far the most famous of the Italian wheat geneticists; he was known as Il Mago del Grano—the Grain Magician.[20]
Producing and Circulating Purity
By the time Strampelli was mobilized for the Battle of Wheat, he was already an experienced scientist. In 1903 he had been hired as the local Experimental Chair of Grain Cultivation (Cattedra Sperimentale di Granicoltura) in Rieti, a small town of the Sabine region in central Italy. Although it seems quite a humble place to launch such a career, Rieti was renowned in Italy for its cereal production—especially for being the place of origin of the Rieti wheat variety.[21] This landrace was highly prized for its strong resistance to stem rusts, caused by the fungus Puccinia graminis, the most common of wheat diseases and well known among cereal growers for its potentially catastrophic effects. Rieti’s wide and fertile valley was a lake until the Romans drained it in the third century BC. Its cold winters and hot, humid summers offered ideal conditions for the development of the fungus.[22] The rust resistance of the local wheat evolved as a result of repeated annual exposure to the extreme environment.
For all its qualities, the Rieti strain was highly susceptible to lodging (the collapse of stems), a problem that grew with increasing soil fertility and plant height. At a moment when chemical fertilizers were the key to achieving record productivities, many traditionally successful varieties were being discarded due to lodging when cultivated in soils treated with phosphates and nitrates. Strampelli’s first works were typical agricultural studies directed to evaluating the effects on wheat yield of different land rotations or different qualities and quantities of fertilizers, but he soon initiated a breeding program to overcome the lodging behavior of the Rieti variety. His program was based on pedigree selection, a technique (made famous by the Vilmorin seed company) in which all descendants derive from a single individual, in contrast with the traditional practice of mass selection (gathering seeds from the best plants for planting in the next year).[23]
The use of pedigree selection had become a major tool for breeders at the turn of the century. Following the example provided by animal breeders and their studbooks, plant breeders made now use of detailed records identifying the genealogy of each individual plant cultivated in their plots. Through pedigree selection, breeders produced varieties selected for some important feature, such as pest resistance, early ripening, or good milling properties.
In 1903—the year Strampelli began his work in Rieti—the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen published the results of his famous experiments with beans, drawing the distinction between genotype and phenotype. Whereas the Vilmorins and other breeders defined the stability of their lines of wheat by referring to repeated rounds of selection, Johannsen defined his “pure lines” of beans in Mendelian terms, as products of self-fertilization of homozygotic organisms.[24] Besides the theoretical breakthrough represented by Johannsen’s experiments, he seemed to have demonstrated the uselessness of making selections from pure lines constituted of genetically homogenous individuals.[25] These pure lines would become central in promises of standardizing agricultural practices, for their homozygosity guaranteed they would always react the same way in the same given environment.[26] They promised the end of the variable and unreliable world of traditional landraces, the local varieties used and produced by farmers, replacing it with a set of standardized genetic products with predictable fixed behavior. More than that, while landraces acquired properties (e.g., the Rieti strain’s resistance to rust) through Darwinian natural selection, the pure lines were produced by artificial selection—by breeders engineering nature.
Using pedigree selection, Strampelli followed two parallel strategies. He began planting several highly productive imported varieties of wheat in a rented experimental plot in the most humid area of the valley, hoping to select those able to resist its highly adverse conditions. At the same time, he made selections of the traditional Rieti variety with the aid of 28 local farmers aiming to identify a line that presented enhanced resistance to lodging. Both strategies failed: all the high-yield foreign wheats suffered severe attacks of rust, and no selection of the Rieti landrace had much resistance to lodging.[27]
16
To have an idea about De Cillis’ work on wheat cultivation in the southern regions of Italy, see Emanuele De Cillis,
17
Mario Zucchini,
18
Emanuele De Cillis, “La Battaglia del Grano,” in
19
Benito Mussolini, “I Contadini Forze Fondamentali per le Fortune della Patria,” Mussolini, “La Battaglia del Grano” (speech, October 11, 1925, Teatro Costanzi, Rome).
20
The main reference for Strampelli’s works is
21
The diffusion of the Rieti variety was greatly enhanced by the arrival of the railway to the town in 1883. Lorenzetti,
23
One of the main precursors of this technique was the French commercial breeder Louis de Vilmorin who pioneered the method of pedigree breeding. On Vilmorin, see Jean Gayon and D. T. Zallen, “The role of the Vilmorin Company in promotion and diffusion of the experimental science of heredity in France, 1840–1929,”
24
On the differences between the Vilmorin pedigree techniques and Johannsen’s concept of “pure-line,” see Gayon and Zallen, “The role of the Vilmorin Company.” Vilmorin wheat varieties were pure lines in Johannsen terms due to the self-fertilization of wheat. The point they make is that the Vilmorins were producing pure lines without knowing it. Notice also that Johanssen didin’t use the terms phenotype, genotype, or homozygote, in those experiments.
25
Staffan Müller-Wille, “Hybrids, pure cultures, and pure lines: From nineteenth-century biology to twentieth-century genetics,”
26
For the promises associated with the “pure-line” concept and its reach beyond Johannsen’s initial use, see Christophe Bonneuil, “Pure lines as industrial simulacra: A cultural history of genetics from Darwin to Johannsen,” in
27
Nazareno Strampelli, “Alcune osservazioni intorno all’ibridazione ed alla selezione del frumento,” Sesto Congresso Internazionale di Chimica Applicata, Rome, 1906.