What is hybrid corn?

hybrid corn, also known as hybrid corn, is an agricultural product created by a cross pollination of various inbred corn lines. It represents more than 90% of all corn grown in the United States due to its large size and uniform appearance. The processes used for interbreed plants were first understood and documented by Gregor Mendel at the age of 60.

Before the discovery of hybrid corn, traditional corn breeding was very simplified. Farmers would choose a group of corn plants that share desirable characteristics, such as disease resistance, large size, height, rapid growth or appearance, and then tried to intensify these properties by setting these plants together and allowing them to breed. Random pollination was very common, so the initial plants in the group were not always only those chosen by farmers. In the course of several generations of inbreeding, this group would growN has become a tension, sharing similar genetic make -up and physical features.

In 1908, the researcher found that if he took two inbed tribes and interbred, the resulting hybrid corn was a much larger and heavier plant than ever from the inbred lines. The agricultural consequences were stunning, and farmers could suddenly produce much more maize than they could produce before. Later, another researcher improved the process of interlaced by suggested that two hybrids could be crossed to create a plant with high production and a high percentage of viable seeds. This type of hybrid became known as a four -way cross. However, the cross crosses have been difficult to develop because there were many possible ways to combine them, each of which had to be grown and compared to others to select the most productive and strongest.

The disadvantage of the growing hybrid corn would not be discovered only many years later, when farmers found that the uniform appearance had carried dangerous genetic uniformity. The more efforts farmers made to make sure that all plants looked the same, the more genetically they made them. The double crossing of the lines has prevented many disadvantages created by traditional inbreeding, but significantly increased the susceptibility to the disease. Without genetic diversity to protect the crop hybrid corn, one pathogen could spread through the field, move from the plant to the plant and infect everything. Modern hybrid corn this problem by crossing hybrid lines with open pollinated corn to create varieties that have specific features but maintain a certain degree of genetic diversity.