Katherine Esau, The Immigrant Beet Biologist Who Transformed Plant Science
In a 1923 photograph, Katherine Esau stands in an Oxnard, California sugar beet field wearing lace-up leather boots, a thick skirt that hangs to mid-calf, a white button-down shirt, and a round white hat. She is not smiling; she is simply showing the camera the sugar beet she holds in her hands. Sugar beets are strange-looking vegetables. The beetroot is conical, white, and weighs between one and two pounds; a rosette of leaves grows over a foot tall out of its flat crown. The stems and leaves fan out below Esau's hands, mirroring the folds of her skirt.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the temperate world tried to turn beets' sugar content—which hovers around 15 percent—into a cash crop that could compete with tropical sugarcane. The industry made the rural, semi-arid American West and Midwest into fields dominated by corporate capitalism and brought German-Russian, Mexican, Chicano, Japanese, Chinese, and Native workers to work them. In the 79,000 acres planted in sugar beets in Colorado in 1909, for instance, 5,870 workers were German-Russian, 2,160 were Japanese, and 1,002 were Hispanic southern Coloradans and northern New Mexicans.
Katherine Esau standing in an Oxnard sugar beet field in 1923. Courtesy of the Katherine Esau Papers. UArch FacP 23. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Esau was part of these flows of beet geopolitics, but in an unusual and privileged way. Esau’s life took her from refugee to ranch foreman, industry scientist to National Medal of Science winner. Yet by leaving the beet industry to become a research scientist, she enacted a politics of refusal, resisting the global, capitalist industry that defined her own mobility, seeking to understand plants rather than control them.
Esau was born in 1898 in Ekaterinoslav, on the steppes of the Ukraine (then a part of the Russian Empire), to a German Mennonite family that had immigrated to Russia at the turn of the 19th century, when Katherine the Great—Esau’s namesake—was promoting agriculture in the region by inviting foreign settlement.
In 1916, Esau enrolled in Golitsin Women's Agricultural College in Moscow. She stayed only one year, until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution forced her to return home. World War I was also underway, and when the German army advanced into Ukraine, Russians began accusing German settlers of enemy sympathies, exiling some to Siberia and Central Asia and prompting thousands of others to migrate to the beet fields of the U.S. When German officers suggested that the Esau family leave for Germany with them, the family accepted. Esau finished her bachelor's degree at the Agricultural College of Berlin, before migrating with her family to the U.S. in 1922. They entered at Ellis Island and settled in Reedley, California, a majority-Mennonite town outside of Fresno, until an absentee investor offered Esau a job managing his new seed production ranch in Oxnard, California.
Oxnard is a beet town: it was founded in 1897 with the construction of a $4 million beet sugar refinery and named after its creator, Henry Oxnard, one of four brothers who had previously operated cane sugar refineries in New York and Louisiana. Oxnard decided to enter into the beet industry because it was "profitable and patriotic." "I saw that every year [America] was sending away a lot of money to buy something which we could just as well produce at home," he stated.
Yet to achieve even slim profits, beet sugar required importation of another kind. In her book “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America,” historian Mae M. Ngai refers to the industry's labor flows as "imported colonialism." Beets needed so much hand labor because the crop was difficult to mechanize. "Seed balls" grew plants in clumps too irregular for machines to harvest; the plants themselves took such varied shapes and sizes that "topping" (chopping the crown of leaves off the root) likewise could only be done by hand. In 1923, the year that Esau spent in Oxnard, the only mechanized tools were seed drills and horse-drawn cultivators. The rest had to be done by hand, as historian Wayne D. Rasmussen describes:
Using a short-handled hoe, the worker would 'block' the beets—that is, would cut out all beets except for clumps standing ten or twelve inches apart. Another worker, on hands and knees, would pull all the plants from the clump except one. The field would be cultivated, usually with a horse-drawn cultivator, often enough to keep down weed growth and maintain a mulch over the ground. A worker with a long-handled hoe would hoe between the plants.
Esau hired a local farmer to operate the horse-drawn cultivator and hired Mexican labor crews for planting and harvesting. Still learning English, she also began taking Spanish classes. Esau's Oxnard experience reveals the complex grid of racial capitalism in the beet industry, in which certain immigrants perform “stoop labor,” others oversee it, and capitalists hoard land and wealth.
A year later, the Spreckles Sugar Company, near Salinas, California, hired Esau to improve P19, a strain of beets that was resistant to curly-top, a disease transmitted by the beet leafhopper that causes plants to turn yellow and stop growing, and their leaves to roll inward and turn purple. Spreckles staff had developed P19 in 1919, but the strain's roots were oddly shaped and low in sugar content.
Spreckles is one of the most important agents in American sugar beet history. The company's Watsonville refinery, built in 1888, was the second successful refinery in North America, after a small factory in Alvarado (now Union City), California. Adding the Salinas refinery several years later, Spreckles' success in scaling up production drew the attention of the Sugar Trust, the east-coast's cane sugar barons, who convinced the company's founder, German immigrant Claus Spreckles, to help expand the sugar beet industry into the interior West and Midwest.
Several years into Esau's work at Spreckles, the chair of the botany department of University of California, Davis, and the chair of the university's Truck Crops Division came to learn what Spreckles was doing about curly-top. After showing them her experimental plots, Esau asked about the possibility of undertaking doctoral studies at Davis. She initially planned to continue hybridizing a curly top-resistant strain of beets, but decided later to study pathological anatomy to better understand how the disease affected the plant.
After her doctorate, Esau became a botanist at Davis' agricultural experiment station, gradually focusing her work on phloem tissue and how it degenerated as a result of disease. Davis' campus was new, and for most of her career—including in 1957, when she was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences—Esau's office was located in a building designed to serve as a garage. When her research began to involve photomicrography, she purchased the equipment personally; all of the photographs in her publications from the 1940s and 50s were developed in the darkroom of the home she shared with her parents.
Katherine Esau Working at Electron Microscope at UCSB. Courtesy of the Katherine Esau Papers. UArch FacP 23. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 1963, Esau moved with her close collaborator Vernon Cheadle to UC Santa Barbara. There she won a National Science Foundation grant to purchase a Siemens Elmiskop 101 electron microscope, which she used to study the tobacco mosaic virus (a study that helped develop the term "P-protein" to describe proteins present in the sieve element of the phloem), the formation of pores in those sieve plates, and how tobacco mosaic, curly-top, beet western yellows, and beet yellow stunt virus affected plants. Her work showed that in some viruses, the phloem is the primary site of infection. She kept writing until her death at 99, "to pass the time;" at the age of 86, she purchased a computer and began taking lessons in how to use it.
A growing body of literature by scholars such as Anna Tsing, Marisol de la Cadena, and Kristina Marie Lyons challenges its readers to rethink human-ecology relations. The reality in the U.S.,especially in California, is that most fields are worked and most food cultivated by immigrant laborers. Industrial agriculture has only become more exploitative of people, plants, soil, and the ecosystems that unite them since the sugar beet era. In 2020, COVID-19 left thousands of poultry processing workers dead, while farm laborers in California spent the fall harvest under red, smoke-filled skies. We can learn much about our broken, industrial food system and how to improve from these scholars and their vision of crops and their ecosystem, of labor and machines.
Katherine Esau provides a window into this question. In switching the course of her career from Spreckles-employed plant breeder to research scientist, she transformed the guiding ethic of her work. Rather than aiming to control plants, crops, diseases and their ecosystems, she sought to understand them on their own terms. She resisted the global, capitalist forces that conscripted her, applying her expertise instead on the plants' behalf. The agricultural system we ought to build centers the well-being of plants, soil, and ecosystems—and makes humans healthier in the process.
Further Reading:
Magnuson, Torsten. 1918. "History of the Beet Sugar Industry in California. Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California 11(1).
Pérez, Bernadette. 2017. Before the Sun Rises: Contesting Power and Cultivating Nations in the Colorado Beet Fields. Dissertation (University of Minnesota). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2280683477). https://search.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/before-sun-rises-contesting-power-cultivating/docview/2280683477/se-2?accountid=14496. Accessed 30 December 2020.
Image Credit: sugar-beet by mendesrocha on Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0
