THE BREEDING OF CORN 191 



to the fact that in Illinois on farms where the number of 

 barren plants has reached as high as about 60 per cent, it 

 has been reduced by five years of selection to about ten or 

 fifteen per cent. De Vries also finds that "some ears pro- 

 duce more than twelve times as many barren stalks as 

 others." Hartley found that the destruction of barren 

 stalks in the field from which seed was saved reduced the 

 percentage of barren stalks in the succeeding crop from 

 8.11 to 3.43. While it is of the utmost importance that 

 barren stalks be destroyed before they produce pollen, it 

 is highly probable that this is only a partial remedy. 

 Strains or varieties of corn that are marked in this defi- 

 ciency should be discarded as a whole as in such cases the 

 propensity to barrenness is in all probabiUty possessed by 

 the fertile plants as well as by the infertile. It is often 

 difficult to detect barren stalks before pollen is produced 

 and for this reason all poor stalks in the seed plot should 

 be destroyed before the poUen^is matured. 



232. Tendency to sucker. — The removal of suckers 

 from the corn plant is common with farmers throughout 

 the southern states, the assumption being that they sap 

 the energies of the main plant by robbing it of food and 

 water without giving a compensating return in grain. 

 The bulk of the evidence is against this practice. Williams, 

 of the North Carolina Station, as a result of three years' 

 work with more than fifty varieties summarizes his work 

 as follows: 



"By assigning a value of 80 cents a bushel for grain and 

 $8.00 a ton for stover, it has been found that, on an average 

 of three years' results on the better grade of land, there 

 was a diminishing by 17.7 per cent of the combined value 

 of the grain and stover by the removal of suckers from the 



