Over 100 years ago, a man traveled north on what most people would consider a foolish mission: to see if crops could grow in the frozen wilderness known as the Alaska Territory.
The man, Charles C. Georgeson, was a special agent with the United States Agricultural Experiment Service, and the Secretary of Agriculture had tasked Georgeson with determining whether crops and livestock could survive on a mysterious piece of land that had been acquired from Russia just 21 years earlier.
When Georgeson landed in Sitka 100 years ago, he began agricultural research that continues today at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Agricultural Experiment Station.
Georgeson, a Danish immigrant, was not a man to be easily discouraged.
In 1898, the Sitka Proving Grounds was in the middle of a swamp, and as he explained in a 1928 interview with Sunset magazine, he rented the land from the Sitka settlers until he could clear and drain it.
“My fields were scattered throughout the village and poorly fenced, or had no fence at all, so local boys, cows, pigs and tame rabbits would run about happily in them,” he says. “The seeds became the playthings of devilish crows, who, with an almost human-like malice, would uproot the little plants just to examine the other side.”
From this shaky start, the federal government has discovered that crops can indeed survive in the Far North, some more than others.
Georgeson soon helped establish other experimental stations: Kodiak Station in 1898, Rampart Station on the Yukon River in 1900, and Copper Center Station in 1903. The last three were Fairbanks, which opened in 1906, Matanuska Farm Station nine years later, and Palmer Research Center, which opened in 1948.
Between World War I and the Great Depression, federal interest in Alaska agriculture waned. By 1932, the agricultural stations of Sitka, Kenai, Rampart, Kodiak, and Copper Center had all closed, although with some success (for example, grains and potatoes were growing well at Rampart, Sitka hybrid strawberries were one of the hardiest of all, and cattle and sheep were thriving at the Kodiak station until the 1912 eruption of Novarupta volcano covered pastures with up to 18 inches of ash).
The stations at Fairbanks and Matanuska survived, and horticulturists and animal breeders today continue the same types of experiments Georgeson did 100 years ago, finding plant and animal species that can adapt to the extreme daylight hours and temperatures of the Far North.
Breeding studies produced the first Sitka hybrid strawberry, developed by Georgeson in 1907. Researchers at the Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station have bred dozens of other varieties that thrive in the North, including the Alaska frostless potato (1970, Matanuska Valley), the Yukon Chief Corn (1974, Fairbanks) and the Toklat strawberry (1976, Fairbanks).
Currently, Alaska-grown crops and livestock account for less than 10 percent of Alaskans' consumption. But the potential is here to grow more. Some parts of Alaska, such as the Tanana and Matanuska Valleys, are thriving. One day, it may no longer be cheaper to import food from outside the state. Then Georgeson's dream of an Alaska farming state may become a reality.
Since the late 1970s, the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has provided this column free of charge in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell (ned.rozell@alaska.edu) is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. A version of this column was published in 1998.
