János Estók
Developing Cereals
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At the end of the nineteenth century a very high gluten level strain, called Tiszavidéki ("from the Tisza region") was the most widely produced variety, grown mostly in the southeastern part of the old kingdom of Hungary, in the less populated areas of the Bácska and the Bánát. To a large degree, this variety was responsible for the country's outstanding figures for exports of wheat and flour. The black rust epidemic in 1860–70 prompted researchers to breed more resistant varieties. Sámuel Mokry (1832–1909) devoted his life to improving varieties of wheat native to the Carpathian Basin. Mokry-wheat was the result of special selection, with a longer and higher yielding ear and larger seed. It resisted draught and produced high-quality straw.
By the first decades of the twentieth century wheat genetics in Hungary achieved significant international success. The most acclaimed autumn wheat sorts, such as Bánkúti 1201, Bánkúti 1205, Fleischmann 481, were all established during this period. Three geneticists with exceptionally high levels of expertise played a key role.
Elemér Székács (1870–1938) bred rust-resistant species, based on the Tiszavidéki variety, which were used all over the Great Plain. Székács, who was the master of specific selection seed improvement, was only known by his nickname: "the wheat ear hunter". Rudolf Fleischmann (1879–1950) developed a world-class autumn wheat variety, F-481, which was called "sziki wheat", because it produced good yield on alkaline soils (szik). Fleischmann was the first in the world to succeed in crossbreeding wheat with wheat-grass. In 1933 the Bánkúti 1201 variety was declared "Best Autumn Wheat" at the World Wheat Exhibition in Regina, Canada. The breeder of this excellent quality wheat was a modest man, László Baross, who did not name the variety after himself. This variety was appreciated around the world.
Baross (1865–1938) studied at the Academy of Agriculture, entering the employment of Archduke Joseph of the Habsburg family. He became animal stock supervisor at the Bánkút estate, in the county of Arad (now in Romania), where he engaged himself in growing of seed for wheat, maize, sugarbeet and other plants. After the First World War, this part of the country was assigned to Romania. Hungarian wheat producers were forced to compete with extremely high quality American wheat, forcing researchers to improve Hungarian wheat varieties.
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Thanks to innovations such as the Mechwart-type steel mill-roller and the Haggenmacher-type flat-bed sieve, the Hungarian flour milling industry and the quality of milling led the word for a certain period of time. In the factory of Ábrahám Ganz, an engineer moved to Hungary from Switzerland, hard-casting was employed not only for manufacturing railway wheels but for milling rollers as well. An engineer born in Bavaria, András Mechwart (1834– 1907), the technical director of the Ganz factory, developed his famous invention, a flour mill with steel rollers. This machine revolutionized flour milling all over the world. His patented invention was preceded by mills employing porcelain rollers operated with gravity pressure, an invention of the Swiss engineer Friedrich Wegmann. The Wegmann-mill was unsuitable for chopping or milling wheat, only for yielding coarse meal. Mechwart introduced steel rollers to the milling process and developed springs and rings for holding the rollers. This small, more effective and smoother mill squeezed the traditional, many thousand years old mill stones out of business. Century old millstones were replaced by steel rollers and now milled finer, higher quality flour. With this type of milling the shell of the wheat is less broken since the surface between the pair of rollers is small, thus bran can be separated easily from the rest of the flour. Plain and roughened rollers were installed in various kinds of Mechwart-type mills. The method developed by András Mechwart became known as "Hungarian milling".
A miller, Károly Haggenmacher (1835– 1921), originally from Switzerland, became a famous beer brewer. In the eighties he developed a new type of sieve, the so called flat-bed sieve, which in contrast to earlier box and cylindrical sieves, significantly improved flour separation and yield. Separation too was gradually improved by installing more and more sieving and extracting frames into the boxes.
Around the year 1900, the output of flour mills in Budapest exceeded 1 million tons per annum. At the time Budapest was the centre of the world's milling industry, later overtaken by Minneapolis in the USA.
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János Estók
is professor at the Teacher Training Institute of Eötvös Loránd University and a member of the Committee for Agricultural History and Village Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His publications are mainly on 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian economic history.
