1. William James Farrer was a leading English Australian agronomist and plant breeder.
16 Facts About William Farrer
2.
William Farrer's work resulted in significant improvements in both the quality and crop yields of Australia's national wheat harvest, a contribution for which he earned the title 'father of the Australian wheat industry'.
3.
William Farrer was born on 3 April 1845 in the town of Docker, Westmorland in the English north west.
4.
William Farrer worked for the Department of Lands in wheat growing districts of NSW from 1875 to 1886.
5.
In 1882 William Farrer married Henrietta Nina, the only daughter of Leopold Fane de Salis, the then Member of Parliament for Queanbeyan, NSW.
6.
William Farrer's goal was to produce a good loaf of bread.
7.
William Farrer applied his scientific knowledge to developing wheat hybrids, initially applying cross-pollination techniques to create rust immune strains of wheat.
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William Farrer readily improvised using hairpins to transfer pollen until he could obtain forceps.
9.
Frederick Bickell Guthrie developed small-scale procedures that emulated a flour-mill and bakehouse; William Farrer used these to assess the yield from the wheat strains.
10.
William Farrer kept up a connection with a French wheat breeder, Henri Vilmorin, who was breeding wheat for dry areas.
11.
Concurrently, William Farrer worked on developing a strain of wheat that could resist bunt or smut-ball, another devastating enemy of wheat.
12.
William Farrer then developed a series of other strains such as Canberra, Firbank, Cleveland, Pearlie White and Florence.
13.
William Farrer's successes led Farrer to become a wheat experimentalist with the NSW Department of Agriculture in 1898.
14.
William Farrer died at his home "Lambrigg" near Tharwa, Australian Capital Territory on 16 April 1906 after suffering a major heart attack, and was buried on his property at dusk the next day.
15.
An Australian electoral division has been named after him, and William Farrer was remembered on the reverse of the Australian two-dollar banknote issued in 1966.
16.
William Farrer is remembered in Wagga Wagga with the Farrer Hotel and the Farrer Football League.