228 Singing Valleys 



in agriculture did not know that until a quarter century later. 

 All that the Federal Department of Agriculture knew was 

 that farm values were down and dropping further every year. 

 It knew too, as even the wheat-growers knew, that the land 

 would return rich crops of maize. But farmers are proverbially 

 slow to change. It took famine and financial panic, as well as 

 the persuasion of Uncle Jerry's department, to move the Iowa 

 wheat farmers over to a corn and hog basis. 



Perhaps if their resistance had been less, the corn-maker 

 would not have exerted so much energy to improve varieties 

 of corn and to discover more and more about corn values. The 

 man who made probably the greatest contribution to this 

 campaign was William J. Beal, who held the post of Botany 

 Professor at the first state college of agriculture to be opened 

 in the country, in Michigan. 



Beal's experiments with zea mays made corn history. He 

 it was who advanced the theory that the open pollination of 

 the plants prevented the growers from ever being sure of the 

 parentage of the seed. When the mating is left to Nature, 

 there's not a corn kernel so wise it knows its own father. And 

 every kernel in an ear of corn can be begotten by a different 

 father. Beal made the first experiments in detasseling plants, 

 thereby permitting only selected plants to fertilize the em- 

 bryos in the cobs. Beal had no knowledge of Mendel's Law 

 that was still buried under piles of papers in a dusty room in 

 Brno, Moravia. But, working in his trial garden at Lansing, 

 pollinating corn by hand, firing the imaginations of his stu- 

 dents with visions of future harvests, William J. Beal made an 

 unfading contribution to American agriculture. 



Many efforts have been made to work out a test for the 

 fertility of seed corn. Today thousands of corn farmers pa- 

 tiently make "rag dolls" and watch these with grave concern. 

 Six or eight grains of corn are nipped spirally from each ear in 

 a numbered tray, and laid in vertical rows on a strip of wet 

 muslin, which is then carefully rolled over and around each 

 row. The ends and middle of the roll are tied securely, it is 



