As this developed, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway company (ATSF) in America was searching

for interested homesteaders to settle and till large tracts of prairie land in Kansas with the plan to
transport their crops to market by train via the first completed Transcontinental Railroad. In 1890s, ATSF
recruitment agents offered lands to the Mennonites of Ukraine and Roman Catholic German farmers in
Russia. Thousands of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia migrated to America where they began
to rebuild their lives and continued with their old traditions and beliefs in their own special way and
planted wheat, just like what they used to do in Russia. They noticed the soil in the Great Plains of
Kansas was almost similar to the soil quality back in the Crimean peninsula.

Aside from the good soil that their new home offered, the Mennonites saw they could finally live in
peace away from persecutions, because in America the freedom to practice one’s religion was not just a
fleeting promise, but rather a written guarantee enshrined in the country’s constitution.

Then the terrible Kansas drought of 1890s hit its croplands. One source says the drought was so bad that
the US Department of Agriculture sent an inspector to examine the withered wheat on acre upon acre
of parched Kansas prairie. It was the worst drought in the history of Kansas, some claim.

Amidst the drought, the USDA inspector observed something extraordinary. The parcels of land settled
in and tilled by the Mennonites were thriving. While other farmers’ wheat had died due to the drought,
the Mennonite farmers’ hard red winter wheat seeds that they have brought from Ukraine had been
unaffected, “reaching bravely for the killer sun!”

(Image via Google)

Later on, the US government learned the Mennonite strain of hard red winter wheat seeds were
drought-resistant, disease-resistant, and rust-resistant that they can be planted in the fall and harvested
in the spring, and can actually withstand the “winter kill”. This phenomenon marked the beginning of
cultivation and active farming of hard red winter wheat in Kansas, making it a famous breadbasket for
wheat in the U.S. The Americans called the Mennonite hard red winter wheat “Turkey Red” because
they believed it originated from Turkey.

Anyway, this development created a competition between Russia and America during the Cold War in
the production of Mennonite hard red winter wheat, until Russia suffered from its own drought and
heat wave in the 70s, devastating its own wheat production. Needless to say, Russia was forced to buy
wheat from the U.S. (Read: “The Great Grain Robbery”)