COKER’S PLANT BREEDING AT 
HARTSVILLE IMPORTANT TO 
SOUTHERN AGRICULTURE 
By HOWARD W. BLAKESLEE 
Associated Press Science Editor 
Hartsville, April 24—Two wars ago Maj. James 
Lide Coker, a wounded Confederate officer, came 
here to Hartsville to operate an inherited farm. 
Some 30 years later his son, David R. Coker, 
began in a small way practical test and scientific 
experiments in plant breeding. 
The ideas which grew out of that farm and 
those experiments are going far today to help 
relieve the national food and long staple cotton 
shortages. 
The ideas have grown into 5,000 acres, all 
seed farms, operated by the Major’s descend- 
ants, the Cokers. These farms, flat emerald 
fields ringed by groves of tall, dark pines, are 
doing for Southern agriculture what pedigreed 
bulls do for livestock production. 
Luther Burbank, on hands and knees, used to 
look at 10,000 plants in his search for the one 
superior bloom that might start a superior race. 
Here the Coker people scan 100,000 for every ten 
that could be detected on hands and knees. 
They use the inheritance laws of the monk 
Gregor Mendel, mathematical charts and a 
systematic culture which grows a single superior 
head of oats, wheat, barley or rye in four years 
to 300 acres, or one superior plant of cotton 
to 10,000 bushels of seed in four years. 
Three years after that the seed could be 
increased to sow the entire South. Each year 
new varieties of plants are ready, an endless 
chain, producing all the time. Tobacco is on the 
Mendelian chain, and coming up are soy beans, 
peanuts and hybrid corn. 
Soon after Mendel’s laws were rediscovered 
early this century, a six-foot, square-jawed, ruddy 
faced South Carolinian, a Cornell graduate, 
George J. Wilds, Jr., went scientific on his job 
here with the Cokers. He wanted to know why 
some oats have a frost-like sheen, others none. 
He cross-bred one with sheen to one without. 
Cold killed the experiment. Next year he tried 
again. He was an amazed young man. He hadn’t 
found the answer to the sheen, but one of the 
oats which previously had been subject to smut 
disease, had become resistant. It had acquired 
that resistance from the mating with the other 
oat, which possessed resistance. 
Young Wilds dropped the sheen and started 
the present breeding system. He is now president 
of the Coker’s Pedigreed Seed Company, which 
was conceived and founded by the late David R. 
Coker, son of the Major. 
Oats illustrate how it is done with all plants. 
You select the best-looking plant in a variety 
having certain qualities a farmer needs. That 
oat becomes the papa. It is cross-bred to a mama 
oat, the latter the best-looking in another variety 
with still another set of qualities which papa 
lacks. 
Next year you set out a single row, 12 or 14 
feet long, never more, of the papa oats. Along- 
side goes a row of the mama oats. And next to 
them, row on row, their offspring, the seed from 
the mating. 
The papas and mamas are there just for 
comparison, or maybe for suspicion that the 
gardener made a mistake. The little offspring 
rows do astonishing things. Some grow tall, 
some scrawny; diseases destroy some, fail to 
touch others. Almost endless acres of these little 
plant families intersperse the piney woods region 
hereabouts. 
From the best looking, best producing offspring 
you select 10 per cent of the plants for seed. 
Next year all their seed babies are again grown 
under similar conditions. From those the best 
10 per cent are again selected. The system passes 
through countless thousands of seeds and never 
fails to produce a superior plant. 
(Continued on page 10) 
Reprint of Article Appearing in THE STATE, Columbia, S. C. 
April 24, 1943. 
Page Three 
