The Science of Maize:

Pioneering a New Image for the Corn State

For richer or poorer, for better or worse, Iowa’s identity is married to a unique native American plant known to scientists as maize and to others as corn. In the words of Iowan Henry Wallace, corn’s greatest lover and the founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred, this has been “one of the great and vital romances of all time.” It’s also been a rocky marriage marked by misunderstandings and mutual dependency.

Corn is a perplexing creature. Technically a fruit (because its germ is embedded in nutrient flesh), it behaves unlike other fruits, converting starch to sugars instead of sugars to starch. Henry Lyte, one of the first botanists to examine plants in America, was baffled by corn’s sexuality.

“This Corne is a marvelous strange plant, nothing resembling any other kind of grayne, for it bringeth forth its seede cleane contrarie from the place whereas forth the Floures grow,” he wrote in 1619.

Even today, organic and pure race corn farmers feel threatened by corn’s wanton promiscuity - male tassel grains can fertilize sticky, hairy female silk wombs in a wind-blown whim.

When Columbus ate corn cakes on Hispaniola, he became the first white person to taste a plant that American Indians had been raising corn for some 7000 years. Tribes took measures to protect the racial purity of their corns, because kernel colors had sacred meaning. When Colonial Americans began raising different races of corn in the same garden, they noticed unplanned copulations. Farmer-preacher Cotton Mather called such promiscuity “vicious” but farmer-scientist Ben Franklin found it promising. Love and sluttiness are both in the eye of the beholder.

By the time railroads crossed Iowa, Franklin’s intellectual followers had improved corn’s stock by selecting seed from the most productive stalks to replant the following year, like American Indians had been doing for millennia. Sub-glacial Iowa contained the richest corn-growing soil on earth. Stalks routinely grew 20 feet high and Iowa proudly became the king of corn states. Hogs, cattle and prosperity followed.

Corn boom towns like Sioux City celebrated with annual rituals of corn pride. Corn palaces were designed by the country’s top architects and attracted sitting Presidents and captains of industry. In 1912 a delegation of Za-Ga-Zig Shriners from Des Moines visited Los Angeles. Wanting to promote the state, they wrote what would become known as "The Iowa Corn Song." That popular ditty affirmed the state’s marriage vows to corn just before the relationship was utterly redefined.

From Colonial times through World War I, corn breeders mostly sought good looking plants. Seed companies held beauty contests with winning ears becoming rich and famous. Henry Wallace determined that corn should be bred to increase yields rather than lovely kernels. In 1926, he founded what would become Pioneer Hi-Bred by selling 49 shares for $100 each.

Wallace’s vision provided the crowning achievement in the industrialization of corn farming. Steel plows had reduced the labor required to raise a bushel of corn from twenty hours to three. When tractors and combines replaced horse power, it took three minutes. By then, Wallace’s hybrid seeds had replaced self pollinated fields and increased yields seven times. In 1946, to cement the state’s claim as the “Tall Corn State,“ Don Radda of Washington, grew a stalk of corn 31 feet and 7/8ths of an inch tall. That still stands as a world record.

In the last half of the 20th century, pride in the marriage began to erode like Dust Bowl soil. Increased productivity made farming more of an industrial game than a family business. Farms became larger and fewer Iowans actually farmed. In the last 100 years, this proud rural state, in which self sufficient farmer-creators formed the majority, had evolved into a suburban/urban state embarrassed by its earthy partner. Cultural elitists portrayed farmers as slow witted hicks who, in the word of expatriate Iowan author Bill Bryson, “habitually stick a finger in their ear and swivel it around as a preliminary to answering any question addressed to them…Their wits are dulled by simple, wholesome faith in God and the soil.”

Some Iowans became ashamed of their spouse and of agriculture in general. The state quickly scrapped “A Place to Grow” as a motto. Schools quit teaching students to sing “The Tall Corn Song.” Corn wasn’t even considered a candidate for artwork on the Iowa quarter.

Then suddenly, in the first decade of the third millennium, corn’s mysteriousness unraveled dramatically as scientists mapped its DNA.
“We now have a germplasm galaxy - a picture of all the inbreds ever developed. It actually looks like a Hubbell telescope photo of a galaxy,” Pioneer Hi-Bred Research Director Dave Bubeck explained.

That revolutionized the way corn was studied and bred.

“From a technology stand point, everything is now digital. We work in labs as well as in real world fields. Because we can do everything digitally in such volume, we created ten times as many corn inbreds in 2010 as in the previous 80 year history of Pioneer Hi-Bred combined,” Bubeck stated casually.
An inbred is potentially one parent of a hybrid. So even Henry Wallace might be astonished at the exponential, new possibilities.

“If you have 700,000 new inbreds, you can’t cross them all. So, we now use a wide and comprehensive range of scientific disciplines. Genetics, molecular biology, plant pathology, statistics, quantum and qualitative genetics, and computer science are all part of managing the information,” Bubeck explained.
Such cross discipline scientists have accelerated understanding the “marvelous strange” grain at a previously unimaginable pace. “In the last ten years, our ability to process DNA information has increased 100 times over. Ten years ago, everything was screened in the field. Think of it like this. Before people had road maps, they guessed where they were going. Before we had DNA maps, we were guessing where we were headed, just like ancient travelers in the unknown wilderness,” Bubeck explained.

Such rapid advancements in plant research created so many proprietary issues that intellectual property (IP) rights has become the fastest growing department in many law schools. Drake University IP Assistant Professor Shontavia Johnson explained the legal dilemma of corn researchers.

“There are three major ways to protect corn inbreds – plant patents under the Plant Patent Act (PPA), certificates issued under the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA), and utility patents. The greatest challenge is choosing the avenue of protection,” Johnson said.

The rapid pace of new research science has freed Pioneer to focus on the specific needs of individual farmers.

“The marvel of digital biology is we’re now able to deal with an infinite set of variables. Variable microorganisms, climates, environments, soils, etc. In Iowa alone we have three main kinds of soil. As we breed new germplasm, we can create a better product and that translates into better performance for our customers,” said Bubeck.

Pioneer sells seed corn in some 70 different countries. Their research staff in Johnston represents so many different nationalities that no one at Pioneer could tell me how many there were, nor the number of languages spoken there.
All this ought to change the way Iowa perceives its marriage partner. Corn today represents everything that politicians and business leaders covet. It’s high tech, cosmopolitan, highly educated, professional, and essential to both world commerce and prosperity.

In the language of genetic scientists, corn has serious “breeding value.” In the language of old fashioned romantics, it’s something for Iowa “to cherish and hold, from this day forward.”

this story was first published in The Iowan