—Lancaster Farmini, Saturday, August 3.1974
16
Corn Breeding Lab-A Monument to Patience
Patience may be a virtue
in everyday life, but it’s an
absolute necessity to the
com breeder. “We don’t see
returns on our work in one or
two years,” Dr. Rodney
Edmondson told Lancaster
Farming. “It takes five to
ten years to develop a hybrid
corn variety with com
mercial value.”
Edmondson expressed
that thought in the middle of
his 20-acre Lancaster County
com breeding nursery. The
nursery, a living storehouse
of genetic material, has been
located on the Clarence
Keener farm near Manheim
for the past four years.
Edmondson works for Funk
Seeds, and is in charge of the
eastern section of their
research division.
The company put a
research operation here to
take advantage of the stress
conditions provided by the
climate. “If we can develop
hybrids that do well here,”
Edmondson said, “we know
they’ll do well just about
anyplace we put them. You
have a warm, humid climate
and loads of diseases and
plant and insect pests. If we
can lick the problems here,
r 1
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we figure we’ve got them
licked anywhere."
Edmondson is responsible
for work not just in the
Manheim laboratory as he
calls his breeding nursery,
but in two others as well. One
is located in Lewisburg, Md.,
and the other is in Akron,
N.Y.
At the local lab, Ed
mondson said one of their
most exciting projects is an
attempt to develop a com
mercial brown midrib silage
corn. “Researchers have
shown that brown midrib
com is much more digestible
than normal com, because
the stalk and eaves have a
lower lignin content. But,
lignin is the material that
gives strength to the stalk,
which means that brown
midrib com doesn’t stand up
as well in the field,” Ed
mondson said.
“We could never use
brown midrib for grain com,
because of standability
problems. But it might work
for a silage crop because
standability isn't quite as
important.”
High lysine and waxy com
breeding projects are also in
the works at Funk and other
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corn breeders. “The
problem with these corns is
yield,” Edmondson said.
“High lysine corn, for
example, yields about 10
percent below normal com.
Both high lysine and waxy
corn, though, superior
nutritionally to normal com,
so we’re seeing if we can’t
increase the yields.”
How exactly is a hybrid
developed? Edmondson said
there are five basic steps.
The first is to develop inbred
varieties with specific
genetic characteristics.
These inbreds are then used
to develop hybrid strains. In
the third step, the hybrids
are tested in research trials
to see if they have any
commerical possibilities. At
this point most of the
unlikely candidates are
weeded out. If the research
trials are promising, the
hybrid goes into a larger
scale commerical test, and if
that works out, it is put on
the market. The entire
process takes from five to
ten years.
Com hybrid growers have
done their work well, Ed
mondson said. “In the 40’s,
com yields were about 45
bushels to the acre. Today,
they’re twice as high. We
have to say that some of the
increase came from im
proved cultural practices,
but I know that if you planted
a 1940 com variety with
modem cultural practices,
you’d have a lower yield.”
Open pollinated com was
the only kind of corn
available before hybrids
came along, and they are
still grown extensively in
some areas. These are
varieties which are allowed
to pollinate naturally with
pollen from the tassles
falling onto the silk of any
plant in the vicinity.
Commerical hybrids are
produced by planting
alternating strips of eight
rows each of two inbred
strains. The tassles are
broken off the plants in the
strips which are to produce
the seeds, but the silks are
left undisturbed. Pollen
floats from the strips with
tassles, and the seed which is
harvested is a true hybrid.
This process illustrates
one reason seed com is more
expensive than the product
which is fed to livestock. The
tassles must be removed by
hand, because there’s no
way to do the job with a
machine. Male sterile
varieties offer another
alternative to detassling by
hand, but this route almost
led to a com catastrophe a
few years ago.
A male sterile variety was
widely used for producing
seed com in the late Sixties,
Edmondson said, which
meant that nearby all the
com in the country had some
genes in common. Un
fortunately, the male sterile
parent was extremely
susceptible to Race T blight,
a disease which caused
economic havoc with com
growers in this country m
1970 and 1971. “We just didn’t
have enough genetic
diversity,” Edmondson said.
“We all learned a lot from
the Race T blight incident,
and I don’t think anything
like that will ever happen
again.”
Genetic diversity in the
nation’s com crop is good
insurance against massive
crop failures, Edmondson
pointed out. “If one hybrid is
[Continued on Page 17|
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hybrid corn varieties fanning out
from an open space in the center.
Each of the commercial hybrids in the
wheel took anywhere from five to ten
years to develop.
Dr. E. Rodney Edmondson, a corn
breeder for Funk Seeds, is very proud
of this section of his com breeding
laboratory at Manheim. It’s a
demonstration wheel, with different
Brad Smith, left, and Leo Hutton, emerging silks of an inbred corn
two of the local high school students variety in order to produce a new
working at the Funk Seeds research hybrid for research
laboratory, prepare to pollinate the
From Field . . .
To Storage .
To Livestock . . .
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Lancaster Farming' Photo*
• •