The Kostka semigroup consists of pairs of partitions with at most r parts that have positive Kostka coefficient. For this semigroup, Hilbert basis membership is an NP-complete problem. We introduce KGR graphs and conservative subtrees, through the Gale-Ryser theorem on contingency tables, as a criterion for membership. In our main application, we show that if a partition pair is in the Hilbert basis then the partitions are at most r wide.