Adair Legacy Lives On
In Arkansas Rice Research
By Howell Medders
The first rice breeder to work in Arkansas, Dr.Charles Roy Adair, and his wife, Ethel Owen Adair, left their entire estate of more than $1 million to scholarship funds at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and Hendrix College in Conway.
Roy Adair was assigned in 1931 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Cereal oats and soybean experiments at the University of Arkansas Rice Branch Experiment Station, now the Rice Research and Extension Center, near Stuttgart.
In 1952 he became the rice investigations leader for the USDA at Beltsville, Md. In addition to coordinating cooperative rice research in the United States, he was a leader in developing international rice research programs.
Ethel Adair was an Extension home economist and home economics teacher in Stuttgart. Roy retired in 1973, and the couple moved to Bella Vista, Ark., in 1976. Roy died in June 1987 at age 82, and Ethel died in August 1992 at age 90. They had no children.
A quiet, serious 26-year-old USDA agronomist from Idaho, fresh out of graduate school, arrived in Stuttgart in 1931 to establish a rice breeding program at the University of Arkansas’s Rice Branch Experiment Station, which had just been established in 1927.
The Grand Prairie farmers of German immigrant stock may have been skeptical about what such a young man, who had never farmed a field of rice, could do to help them improve the crop they had been farming for the past 25 years. But they were more than willing to give him a chance, and many of them brought seeds carefully selected from their fields for Adair to use in his breeding program.
They were anxious for any improvement in rice yields that had averaged only 40 to 50 bushels per acre since the first fields were planted by W.H. Fuller in 1904 in Lonoke County. They needed a solution to the problem of periodic crop failure, mainly from lodging due to stem rot and weak straw. With rice selling at a Depression price of 50 cents or less per bushel if a buyer could be found, a crop failure often meant losing the farm. Roy Adair knew he was lucky to have a job, and he knew that rice farmers in Arkansas and other states desperately needed any help he could give them.
Adair is described by those who knew him at the time as a tireless, dedicated worker. One of his closest colleagues was E.M. Cralley who joined the UA faculty as a plant pathologist the same year that Adair arrived in Stuttgart. Like Adair, Cralley had a Midwestern farm background. “I came from the University of Wisconsin and had never seen a rice plant. I thought I was going to the end of the world. But it turned out to be very interesting,” says Cralley, who, like Adair, became an internationally recognized rice research scientist.
Cralley recalls that Adair was passionate about his work: “Rice was not only his work, but his hobby and almost his religion.”
The serious young scientist and his colleagues at the Rice Branch Station society produced results with the release in 1936 of Zenith, a medium grain variety that was higher-yielding, earlier maturing, more adaptable to drying and more disease resistant than Blue Rose, the leading variety at the time.
Adair said in a June 1973 Rice Journal article at the time of his retirement: “I think any breeder receives great satisfaction out of producing a variety that meets the immediate needs of a specific area, and that’s what the Station did during this period.”
Former Riceland Foods general manager Clark Smith said in the same article, “In Arkansas he was called the savior of the industry when his variety Zenith filled the gap left by the disease-plagued Blue Rose rice.” By 1949 Zenith was the dominant medium-grain variety and accounted for more than 30 percent of the total acreage.
The seeds containing the Zenith germ plasm were from one of many selections given to Adair upon his arrival at the Rice Branch Station in 1931. DeWitt farmer Glen K. Alter made the selection from early maturing plants in a field of Blue Rose.
In addition to the accomplishments of Adair and his colleagues in rice, which included seven new varieties (Zenith, Arkrose, ReXark, Kamrose, Nira 43, Prelude and Arkansas Fortunal), he developed three oat varieties ( DeSotot, Taggart and Delair) and helped establish soybeans as a major crop in the South. Discovering Zenith in Glen Alters’ seed selections must have been a factor in Adair’s devotion to building the USDA Rice Germplasm Collection.
Robert Dilday, USDA genetics at the UA Rice Research and Extension Center, says Adair helped collect and maintain some 6,000 accessions during his 21 years at Stuttgart. As USDA rice investigations leader, he championed the maintenance and expansion of the collection and helped establish the World Rice Collection at the International Rice Research Institute, Los Banos, Philippines.
It was Dilday’s grandfather. H.D. Dilday, who farmered at Yoder just down the road from the Rice Branch Station, who gave Adair the seed used to start the collection that Dilday now works with in his research to find, identify and enhance valuable genetic traits such as herbicide tolerance and allelopahtic activity against weeds.
The USDA collection of more than 16,000 accessions of types with growing periods suitable for the United States will be maintained and studied in the USDA Rice Germplasm Evaluation and Enhancement Center to be located at Stuttgart. Currently in the design phase, which should be completed this year, the center will be a fitting tribute to Adair’s memory, Dilday says.
Another Adair legacy is the Regional Rice Quality Laboratory at Beaumont Texas, where potential varietals release must pass inspection for excellent cooking and processing qualities.
The varieties developed by Adair are no longer grown commercially and even the “Adair” variety released in 1993 from the cooperative breeding program at the Rice Research Extension Center in honor of the state’s first rice breeder is destined to become a relic. But the Adair legacy will live on in ever-better varieties possessing genes from the national and world germ plasm collections, in the high standards assured by the Rice Quality Lab, and in the careers of other scientists and educators who are trained to rise to the challenges of their times with the aid of Roy and Ethel Adair Scholarships.