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More than 100 years ago, a man traveled north on a mission that most people considered ridiculous: to see if crops would grow in the frozen wasteland known as the Territory of Alaska.
That man, Charles C. Georgeson, was a special agent in charge of the United States Agricultural Experiment Stations. The Secretary of Agriculture tasked Georgeson with discovering whether crops and farm animals could survive on the mysterious land acquired just 21 years earlier from the Russians.
When he landed in Sitka 100 years ago, Georgeson launched agricultural studies that are still conducted today at the University of Alaska’s Fairbanks Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
Georgeson, a Danish immigrant, was not a man to be easily discouraged.
In 1898, the site of the Sitka Experiment Station was in the middle of a swamp. Until he could clear and drain the land, he borrowed pieces of land from Sitka settlers, as he explained in an interview in Sunset magazine in 1928.
“My plots were scattered throughout the village and, having insecure fences or no fences at all, local children, cows, pigs and domesticated rabbits frolicked happily among them,” he said. “The seeds emerged to become toys for diabolical crows, who, with almost human malice, plucked the little plants simply to inspect their other ends.”
From this shaky beginning came the discovery by the federal government that crops could survive in the Far North, some better than others.
Georgeson quickly helped establish other experimental stations: a Kodiak station in 1898, one at Rampart on the Yukon River in 1900, and another at Copper Center in 1903. The last three were at Fairbanks, which opened in 1906, the agricultural station was established Matanuska. nine years later, and the Palmer Research Center, opened in 1948.
Federal interest in Alaska agriculture declined during World War I and the Great Depression. By 1932, the Sitka, Kenai, Rampart, Kodiak, and Copper Center farm stations had closed despite some success (for example: grains and potatoes did well at Rampart; the Sitka hybrid strawberry is among the most hardy of all breeds; and cattle and sheep thrived on Kodiak Station until the eruption of the Novarupta volcano in 1912 covered the pastures with up to 18 inches of ash).
The Fairbanks and Matanuska stations have held on. Today, horticulturists and animal breeders conduct the same type of experiments that Georgeson did 100 years ago, finding plant and animal species capable of adapting to the Far North’s extremes in day length and temperature.
Crossbreeding studies first arose the hybrid Sitka strawberry, developed by Georgeson in 1907. Researchers at the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station have bred a few dozen other varieties that thrive in the north, including the Alaska frost-free potato. (1970, in Matanuska Valley), Yukon. main corn (1974, in Fairbanks) and Toklat strawberry (1976, in Fairbanks).
Today, crops and animals grown in Alaska account for less than 10% of what Alaskans consume. But the potential for more is here. Crops and animals thrive in some areas of Alaska, such as the Tanana and Matanuska Valleys. Maybe one day it won’t be cheaper to import food from outside of Alaska. Perhaps then Georgeson’s dream of Alaska being an agricultural state will come true.
Keynote USA
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