My DeKalb hybrid story
John E. Peterson - Special to the Gazette
Thursday, August 21, 2008
A FEW columns back, I wrote about my home town, Dekalb, Ill. That column was about barbed wire being invented in DeKalb. I also mentioned that hybrid corn was first developed there. That mention brought a couple of questions about hybrid corn.
I have had other questions and comments about DeKalb Hybrid corn over the years. Some of my early summers were spent working in its development. Consequently, the topic has long been in my head. Recently, I have seen the DeKalb corn cob on TV advertisements. It is a big, yellow corn cob with two green wings above it and DeKalb written across it. It is now being used to advertise products other than corn.
You will read about my experiences with Dekalb Hybrid corn, if I have my way. First, however, if I had my way, I would refresh your mind on how the corn plant works.
A single corn plant, like many other plants, produces both sexes. The tassels at the top produce pollen, the male component. Down on the stalk, the corn cob develops. This is the female part. It produces “silk” outside the cob so that the pollen can land there and eventually get inside to form the corn kernels.
Corn, then, will fertilize itself. A hybrid, of course, is a cross between two different plants, two different genetic types. So, how was that done? We will get to that shortly, but first let us get to the final cross, the one which produces the hybrid seed which will be sold for planting. It took ten years, ten crosses, as I recall, to get to the final planting where seed for sale would be produced. Then, four rows of one strain would be planted with two rows of the other strain beside it. Huge fields would be planted this way.
The four rows would be the females, the ones which would produce the saleable hybrid seed. The two rows would be the pollen-producing strain.
Here is where I come into the picture in 1936. Those four female rows must be pollinated by the two male rows, not by their own pollen. That means that the tassels at the top of every stalk in the four rows must be pulled off early and thrown on the ground. How is this done? By me and lots of other boys and men.
Each of us is assigned two rows to detassel. We walk down between them, pull the developing tassels and toss them on the ground. That may be a half-mile walk, but when we get to the end, we are given two more rows to detassel as we walk back in the other direction. So the detasseling goes.
What is the day like? It starts at 5:30 a.m. as we gather to be trucked out to the fields. In addition to those of us who are employed, there are probably 100 men and boys there hoping somebody does not show up. They want a job. We are trucked out to the field, detassel for five hours, get a half hour to eat our own lunch, detassel another five hours and are trucked back to town.
That is a 12 and one-half-hour day. We got 25 cents per hour for 10 hours of work. There is no pay for going out and coming back or for the lunch break. Pay went up to 35 cents an hour after a couple of years, as I recall.
Speaking of pay, there is this story. World War II started in the early 1940s. Soon, there were no young men to do the detasseling. How can the detasseling get done? The solution was to bring girls out from Chicago. Some little shacks were built to house them and they were paid $1.50 an hour. When we heard about that, it just drove us wild. Imagine that! We detasseled for 25 cents. Chicago girls did it for $1.50.
Now, then, back to the 10 years or so of crossings before that final production year. I got involved in this in about 1938. That was because I was then in college, a biology major, and therefore considered capable of handling the crossing work.
One of the corn strains, the female, was to produce corn ears. Another, the male, was to produce the pollen. As soon as ears began to form on the female strain, we put paper bags on them. Later, we gathered pollen from the male strain in paper bags. Two of us worked as a team.
We would go to the female strain, one of us would lift the bag off the ear and the other one of us would dump the pollen on the silk under the bag. That is how we made the genetic crosses. We often kidded as to how we were fooling with the sex life of the corn plants. And, of course, we were.
Enough about how DeKalb Hybrid corn was produced. I am giving you my version of what I remember happening 70 years ago. It is probably all done differently now, but I have no idea whether that is the case.
It is obvious, I expect, that my DeKalb days were happy, memorable days for me. They were the days of my youth. They are remembered even if I only got paid 25 cents an hour. All of us would have equally memorable youthful days, if I had my way.
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Posted by create (anonymous) on August 21, 2008 at 5:13 p.m. (Suggest removal)
You'll have your way then, because my youthful days were happy ones spent working for Dole Pineapple Company, quite a bit south and west of DeKalb. I was a trimmer and earned $1.17 per hour trimming eyes off pineapple by slipping my thumb into the hole that was cut into the middle of the pineapple by machine, and flicking off the eyes with a sharp knife. I thought my thumb would fall off, but hot dang, I was 16 and those wages bought me a 1954 Chevy Bel Air. That's happiness!
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