DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you ever drive through Hardeman County and find yourself wondering what kind of ground could change the farming future of an entire region, well — you might just be standing near the answer. This place carries a title worth saying slow: Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation Number 12.
Home of Hybrid Sorghums. And that last part isn't bragging. That's a statement of fact with decades of sweat behind it.
The story reaches back to 1909. Back then, the station sat six miles northeast of where it stands today, and somebody made a decision that didn't look like much at the time. They put seeds in the ground.
But not just any seeds. These were sudan grass seeds — a sorghum especially adaptable to semiarid regions, which is a scientific way of saying it could thrive in country that would break your heart and dry your well. The United States Department of Agriculture had brought those seeds all the way from Khartum, Africa.
And right here, in Hardeman County, Texas, went the first planting of sudan grass in the entire United States. Let that settle in for a moment. The whole country, and it started here.
But planting that first crop was just the opening note. What followed was more than a half-century of sorghum breeding — patient, methodical, relentless work — carried out under the supervision of A. B.
Conner, J. R. Quinby, J.
C. Stephens, and other scientists who showed up year after year to coax something better out of that West Texas soil. And they got there.
All that breeding, all those seasons, culminated in hybrid seed for more productive crops — crops that revolutionized the agriculture of the Great Plains. Revolutionized. Not nudged.
Not improved. Revolutionized. So next time you cross the wide, dry flats of the Panhandle and see sorghum fields stretching out to the horizon, remember this patch of Hardeman County ground.
The seeds that changed the Plains came from Khartum, Africa — and they grew up right here.
What the marker says
Forage crop field station at which in 1909 (when situated 6 miles NE) was planted the United States' first sudan grass, a sorghum especially adaptable to semiarid regions. The United States Department of Agriculture had brought the seed from Khartum, Africa. Here ensued more than a half-century of sorghum breeding under supervision of A. B. Conner, J. R. Quinby, J. C. Stephens and other scientists, culminating in hybrid seed for more productive crops that revolutionized the agriculture of the Great Plains. (1971)