How the date palm made its way west from its Persian Gulf “homeland” across the Sahara and on to the Coachella Valley is a tale of ingenuity, adaptation, and persistence in some of the harshest environments on Earth. It’s also a story with darker chapters, of empire(s) and expropriation, slavery, and yes, even tariffs.
Expropriation and Empire(s)
In the spring of 1927, USDA plant pathologist and date specialist Walter Tennyson Swingle joined a French-sponsored multinational research team sent to investigate the recently identified Bayoud (or Baioudh) fungal disease ravaging the prized Medjool (or Mejhoul) date palms from the Moroccan Tafilalet, which Swingle called the “greatest date oasis of Africa” in 1945 in the proceedings of the 22nd Annual Date Growers’ Institute. On the way, the team stopped for several days at the French Foreign Legion outpost at Bou Denib, “about 100 miles east” of their destination, to organize their military escort, since “the country was not yet fully pacified.” While there, Swingle befriended the local sharif, who took the scientist on a tour of Bou Denib’s 9,000-tree date palm oasis.
When Swingle discovered a small stand of uninfected Medjool trees on one plot, he asked the sharif if he could purchase some offshoots from the “mother” tree to send home, “as we did not then have this famous variety in our country.” Soon thereafter, a box of eleven offshoots were on their way to the American Southwest; the descendants of those trees now produce a quarter of all dates grown in the US and most of the Medjools—considered the “King of Dates” due to their size and sweetness—harvested worldwide.
Swingle’s accession was by no means the first such shipment sent to the US from points East. It wasn’t even Swingle’s first date importation venture; he had gone to French Algeria twice between 1898 and 1900 in search of the Rhars and Deglet Noor varieties, the latter a “sweet and nutty” cultivar that yields up to 300 lbs per tree per year, according to University of Arizona plant scientist Glenn C. Wright. The FAO has called it the “most popular variety in the EU.” In 1902, Swingle’s longtime friend and chief of the USDA’s Seed and Plant Introduction office, David Grandison Fairchild, sailed up the Persian Gulf to Baghdad collecting offshoots from what was then the largest date palm region on the globe. Several other USDA-sponsored and private date-collection expeditions to the region in the first decades of the twentieth century meant that by the 1930s Swingle could rightfully claim that “no country” had accumulated “such a complete collection of the choice [date] varieties (‘over one hundred’)” than the United States.