SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETING. 263 



Q. What do you call right conditions? 



A. The conditions should be such that when the pollen is 

 being shed, for a period of about a week you would have warm, 

 sunshiny days, dry weather, and not too hot, so as to dry up the 

 silk prematurely. Corn does not fill out on the tip for two main 

 causes : On the one hand, there may not be enough pollen for 

 all the silks, or, on the other hand, the silks may either not de- 

 velop properly, or die before the pollen reaches them. If a 

 piece of corn develops unevenly, so that you get an uneven dis- 

 tribution of pollen in respect to time, you are apt to get a good 

 many badly tipped ears. 



Q. Would you advise detasseling, — taking off the tops? 



A. That is a question in corn breeding. If you talk with a 

 cattle breeder, as I happened to do this morning, and the talk 

 turns on corn breeding, it seems, to the cattle breeder, to be the 

 most ill-guided, ill-conducted thing in the world. On the ordi- 

 nary plan of corn breeding you are controlling only the female 

 line. The question has been considered a good deal by the 

 plant breeders, and various schemes devised to control the male 

 line or the sire in corn breeding. Perhaps the best method so 

 far worked out for dealing with this problem is that which uses 

 only one sire ear in the seed breeding plot. This sire ear is chosen 

 because of its supposed ability to transmit good qualities, as in- 

 dicated in several years of ordinary ear-to-row testing. The 

 practice of persons following this method is as follows : 



If they find a pedigree strain or row of corn, planted on the 

 ear-to-row method, that for two or more consecutive years 

 yields considerably higher than the other rows, they come to the 

 conclusion it has some good in it, and one or more ears are taken 

 from it to serve as sire plants for the next year's seed plat. A 

 square plat is planted for seed. In the center of that plat are 

 planted the ears (or ear) which have been chosen to furnish the 

 pollen, that is to be the sire plants. Then just as soon as the 

 tassels are out and before the silks appear all the plants in the 

 plat except these sire plants in the center are detasseled. The 

 ears from the detasseled plants are saved for seed. This meth- 

 od corresponds to the practice of grading up cattle with a pure- 

 bred male. By this means you can control the male parent in 

 corn. It has been shown that if you bring together in corn two 

 unrelated strains you can get an increase in the yield. There 

 have been figures published that give a very great increase. For 



