No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 539 



tassel and the ear at the right height, that was the stock on which 

 we selected the seed corn to begin with. But I want to say to you 

 that takes a little bit of work. Now, we have found this, that when 

 we select seed corn from the stocks that have done well under the 

 environment where it had to fight for everything it had gotten 

 that you gain a strength of character behind it that you do not 

 get when you select the seed corn right at random right out of 

 the pile. We have found that. 



Now, then after working along that line for a little while we went 

 to corn breeding. We selected the best ears we could find, those 

 that suited us best, and we planted those ears in the rows by them- 

 selves. Suppose we had an ear here that was just exactly what 

 we wanted, and we took the corn from that ear and we planted it 

 in row No. 1; and suppose we had another ear that suited us very 

 well. We took the corn from that and we planted it in row No. 

 2, and the corn from another ear in row No. 3 and so on until we 

 had twenty or thirty rows. We had that corn there pitted against 

 itself just exactly as you dairy men do with your cows. You know 

 what every cow is worth to you and what she produces in money 

 for you. You can do the same thing with corn. And then we 

 watched that corn and, gave it good cultivation, the kind corn ought 

 to have. We planted in rows three and a half feet apart, and three 

 feet apart in the row. That is two stalks to the hill. That is thick 

 enough planting. A lot of people plant pretty near twice as much 

 as that, that is, twice as thick. But I want to say you are doing 

 it at the risk of getting quantity when you plant that thick. You 

 get nubbins when corn is planted too thick, and you do not want 

 nubbins. That is the thing we have been fighting. We had these 

 twenty or thirty rows of corn running parallel through the field 

 and we could see what they would do. They were up against each 

 other in competition. And what did we find? We found here a 

 row that would have a lot of nubbins, by selecting the very best 

 kind of an ear you see. Then we had another row that had barren 

 stalks in it, then we had another row — and this happened last sum- 

 mer, — after seven years work along this line — then we had another 

 row with ears away up there, six feet above the ground, entirely 

 too high. I say this very thing happened with the ears of corn last 

 summer in my case, after seven years work on this line. I cannot 

 explain it. That row of corn did not ripen out of the limits of our 

 season. We have about one hundred and twenty days, fully one 

 hundred and twenty days in which to ripen corn. Still you have 

 another kind of a row. You have another one that had weak tassels, 

 and another one that the ears are produced too low on the stalk 

 they riped too early, do not take up the entire season. 



And so you can pick out. You have here an opportunity of seeing 

 just exactly what the results are and that will give you a pretty 

 fair average of what you have in your entire crop, to show just 

 exactly what those ears are capable of doing and what will be the 

 result. Now, select the seed corn from the row that has given you 

 the largest quantity. We ought to do that; but I did not always 

 do it. Now, always. Why not? Because some of these rows had 

 produced a lot of nubbins, two ears on the stalk and not very large 

 ones, and I do not like that and I am growing corn. Mark this. 



