Charles E. Saunders

Sir Charles Edward Saunders was a Canadian agronomist who developed the Marquis wheat cultivar, one of the most consequential wheat varieties in North American history. Trained as a chemist with a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, he completed development of Marquis in 1904, breeding a strain that showed marked superiority in milling quality for bread flour over the varieties then popular in western Canada. By 1920 Marquis wheat accounted for roughly ninety percent of the wheat grown on the Canadian prairies, even though the variety lacked resistance to rust, and its early maturity let farmers push wheat cultivation into more northerly and drought-prone parts of the prairies than earlier varieties allowed. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Flavelle Medal in 1925 for this work.