Sir Charles Edward Saunders, Dominion Cerealist

Charles Edward Saunders was born in London, Ontario, in 1867. His father, Sir William Saunders, was the first director of the Dominion Experimental Farms (1886–1911). Charles received his B.A. with honours in science from the University of Toronto in 1888 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1891. He attempted a career in music, his first love, from 1893 to 1902. With his father, Charles attended the 1902 International Conference on Plant Breeding and Hybridization in New York, where he learned of Mendel’s theories of inheritance and their applicability to plant breeding. When he began work in 1903 in the Division of Cereal Breeding and Experimentation at the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, he used the knowledge he had gained at that conference. It was Charles’s goal to achieve “fixity” in the varieties that had been bred and released using phenotypic mass selection, prior to his tenure as Cerealist. He selected four heads from the wheat variety Markham and in the winter of 1904 he performed a “chewing test” to select for gluten elasticity and colour. Seeds from two heads were chosen, and seeds from one went on to produce the variety Marquis after extensive yield trials on the Prairies. Marquis was 7 to 10 days earlier than Red Fife, the standard bread wheat of the Prairies. The earliness and tremendous yield of Marquis wheat resulted in the rapid and successful settlement of the Great Plains and countless billions of dollars in revenue to Canada. By 1923, 90% of the spring wheat in Canada and 70% in the USA was Marquis. Charles continued as Dominion Cerealist until his retirement in 1922. He was knighted in 1934, and died in 1937.