Turkey Red: The Mennonites and the Wheat That Made Kansas

In the autumn of eighteen seventy-four, the first Mennonite families from the Russian steppes arrived in central Kansas. They had come from the Molotschna and Chortitza colonies of what is now Ukraine, communities that Catherine the Great had invited to Russia a century earlier with promises of land, religious freedom, and exemption from military service. Those exemptions were now being revoked by the czarist government. The Mennonites, who held nonresistance as a central religious principle, were not willing to serve in armies. They left.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway wanted settlers on its Kansas land grant and recruited German-Russian farming communities. The railway sold Mennonite emigrants land in central Kansas, including what is now Marion, Harvey, Reno, and McPherson Counties. Within a few years, thousands of Russian Mennonites had settled there.

According to family tradition, they brought something with them that changed the American food supply: a hard red winter wheat called Turkey Red, though some experts doubt how much seed they could have carried. Whatever its exact route, the variety was high in protein and resisted disease and winter cold. The Kansas prairie, which had defeated earlier wheat varieties with its temperature swings and dry springs, proved ideal for Turkey Red. Within a generation of the Mennonite settlements, Turkey Red was being grown across Kansas, then Nebraska, then the entire central plains.

Turkey Red helped turn Kansas into one of the great wheat regions of the world, and many modern Kansas wheat varieties trace back to it. Plant breeders at Kansas State, working with Turkey Red and other imported varieties, developed improved strains for the twentieth century.

The Mennonite communities built stone churches and stone farmhouses using the limestone that lies close to the surface across much of central Kansas. Many of those buildings still stand. Driving through Harvey or McPherson County today, you are driving through the landscape that fed a nation, planted by farming families who left Russia rather than fight in someone else's war.