Kindred began as an agricultural community and that tradition continues today.  It was platted in 1880 when the railroad reached the area and named after rail and land company official William A Kindred.

Early settlement started in 1871 with Norwegian families moving to the prairie.  It was finally incorporated as a city in 1949.  Kindred is full of rich generational family history. 

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One of those families is the Lykken Family.  Sam Lykken nurtured a single barley plant to maturity with a yield of eighteen kernels.  His son, Sam Jr. remembered him shelling it out at the kitchen table.  Sam offered some his barley to agronomists at the North Dakota Agricultural College (now NDSU) to use for testing and breeding.  It proved to be winner and when the refined barley became available to upper midwestern farmers during the 1940's it carried the name KINDRED.

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In the following decade there were four rust epidemics that hit the country but, the damage to the region's barley crop was negligible.  A plant pathologist explained that what made Kindred barley so special was it's "T-gene", which enabled resistance to the wheat stem rust fungus.  The fungus constantly adapts to it's environment and eventually overcomes a plant's defenses.  Decades later, the Kindred T-gene still helps protect upper midwestern barley varieties. 

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"Lykken's selection of what became Kindred Barley has to the most significant contribution to barley production in the upper Midwest during the twentieth century.  Farmers will not obtain good yields or malt quality unless there is rust protection in the varieties grown.  The savings to growers must been in the hundreds of millions of dollars."