AGRICULTURE: The Pushbutton Cornucopia

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BILL FARR has just installed an automated $200.000 feed mill, 100 ft. high and 60 ft. long, to prepare food for the 10,000 cattle he fattens on his feed lots near Greeley, Colo. Truckloads of corn, barley, dry beet pulp, dehydrated alfalfa, protein mix, etc. are ground and mixed into eight different types of feed to give the maximum weight gain to cattle at different age levels. In addition to antibiotics and minerals, Farr also adds tranquilizers to make the animals eat more, avoid threshing around and bruising their flesh en route to the slaughterhouse.

Corn the Key. If any single event can be said to have touched off the farm revolution, it was the development of hybrid corn. It opened the eyes of farmers and scientists alike to the vast increase that could be made in food production. Following Mendelian genetic principles, Professor George Harrison Shull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington developed the first hybrid corn in 1908. This was more than mere crossing: by generations of inbreeding he got pure strains which when mated yielded an almost explosive yield increase given the name of "hybrid vigor." But Shull's work was commercially valueless; the seed was too expensive. Not till 1935, after further discoveries by U.S. Department of Agriculture Researcher Donald Jones and commercial seedsmen, such as Henry A. Wallace, onetime (1933-40) U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, could commercial seed companies put hybrid corn on the market.

Last year U.S. farmers seeded 90% of their corn acreage with hybrid corn, got a total yield of 3.4 billion bu.—750 million bu. higher than they could have produced with regular corn. The wonders of hybrid corn are still surprising the scientists. For example, last year Illinois Farmer James Holderman decided to try a new type of hybrid corn, even though the experts warned him it was not suitable for his land. He doubled the amount of fertilizer, planted the rows closer together, and his yield jumped to 175 bu. an acre, compared to an average 70 bu. The corn was so thick that his mechanical picker just barely got through it. Now corn experts are studying Holderman's experiment to see exactly what happened—and if it should be recommended to everyone.

At the University of Illinois, Associate Professor Earl R. Leng has developed a dwarf corn that he hopes will some day end farmers' worries from windstorm damage. The short stalk is also ideal for automated pickers. By crossing his dwarf corn with teosinte, a Mexican grass, he has also developed a stalk with 20 small ears all along the stalk. If he can increase the size of the ears, the corn of 1965 may well resemble a hat tree.