New Southern Pea Variety Named For Longtime Breeder
February 1, 2016 
The Ogle Southern Pea is available for growers through the S.C. Crop Improvement Association, a cooperative with Clemson, USDA, and other agencies that develops and distributes seeds to growers.
Image Credit: Clemson University
Its creator retired before it was completed. It sat dormant for 20 years. The cold-storage facility keeping it alive was nearly shuttered. But the ‘Ogle’ Southern Pea has survived nearly 60 years and is now available to South Carolina growers.
The Clemson University Experiment Station this year released a new plant variety called the ‘Ogle’ Southern Pea, a time-tested vegetable named after retired plant breeder Roy Ogle, whose varieties remain common in South Carolina gardens nearly three decades after his retirement. The pea features a large seed for eating, strong yield potential, a colorful purple hull and disease resistance, particularly to the costly Blackeye cowpea mosaic virus.
The variety has performed well in informal taste tests too, said Chris Ray, a plant breeder and director of the Experiment Station.
“The southern pea was a staple in South Carolina and the Southeast. If you would turn the clock back 50 years, or 70 years, you’d be hard pressed to find any family that didn’t grow southern peas. They store well. You can dry them out. You don’t have to freeze them,” he said.
The seed is produced at the Clemson Experiment Station and available for purchase through the South Carolina Crop Improvement Association, a cooperative with Clemson, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies that develops and distributes seeds to growers.
Ogle, 93, is a World War II veteran who landed at Omaha Beach a few months after D-Day in 1944 and spent six weeks fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He worked at Clemson University from 1957 to 1987. In his first year on the job, he developed two types of Southern Peas, commonly called cowpeas, that would be crossed many times over the next six decades — that’s a long time even for plant breeding — to become the variety just released under this name. He knew the pea only as SC84-319, numbers he can pull from memory still.
Three years after Ogle’s retirement, Ray joined Clemson has an undergraduate student to study horticulture. Ray, who has a doctorate from Clemson in plant and environmental science, became an old-fashioned plant breeder in the mold of Ogle and others like him, crossing the flowers of plants with desirable traits and growing them over and over to develop hearty, profitable varieties for South Carolina growers.
In 2005, Ray was managing the university’s Seed Certification Program when approached by an administrator who considered pulling the plug on the two cold-storage facilities preserving the work of Ogle and other Clemson plant breeders. The systems are expensive to operate. Ray was to document the coolers’ inventories. He needed breeders’ documentation to know exactly what was in all those drawers of seeds. Ray contacted Ogle, who still had a large stack of books documenting every cross he made during 30 years of plant breeding at Clemson. Ogle could recite his experiments from memory. Ray was shocked and a bit skeptical, but Ogle’s recollection matched the documentation.
“I had about 300 breeding lines to be exact,” Ogle said.
Ray quickly identified the favorable traits of SC84-319, the ‘Ogle’ pea, and began to grow plants to rebuild its seed supply. He was surprised by the productivity of a seed that had been in cold storage for 20 years.
“That’s a testimony to our cold storage facilities,” Ray said.
Those facilities were preserved and are now funded with revenues from the Clemson University Official Variety Trials and royalties from plant varieties developed at Clemson, and the S.C. Crop Improvement Association, which runs the foundation seed program to provide growers with the highest-quality planting stock available. The association also provides cold storage to preserve seed.
As Ray continued development of the ‘Ogle’ pea, he and Ogle formed a bond. Ogle visited annually to oversee Ray’s progress with SC84-319. Ray grew plants for several years after 2005 to build the seed supply. Ogle, whose feet had been badly wounded by frostbite during the war, would walk fields with Ray, picking out plants missing the right color or seed size or other traits pure to SC84-319.
“That’s the art of plant breeding,” Ray said. “You have to have a good eye.”
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