Word: corn
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Iowa's famed tall corn is getting too big for its roots. Now some lowans would like to breed back into U.S. corn the qualities which were sacrificed for bumper size and bumper production. They would like to reinvigorate corn with greater root strength and resistance to heat, drought, insects and disease...
...such corn-doctors are Iowa State College's President Charles E. Friley and Professor I. E. Melhus. Firmly believing that the way to study a plant is to go back to its place of origin, they were in Guatemala recently putting the final touches to a namey venture called the Iowa State College Guatemala Tropical Research Center-a corn study station in the beautiful ghost town of Antigua. 60 miles from Guatemala City...
They had gone to the right place. Experts say that most corn varieties are native to Guatemala and southern Mexico -just as the peach is native to China. the English walnut to Persia, celery to the Mediterranean. Sometime around the 5th Century, primitive South American corn, which had small, globular ears and irregular kernels, was crossed with the strong, tall gamma grass which grows in Central America. Result of this crossbreeding was teosinte, an earless corn-producing plant which still grows wild in Mexico and the highlands of Guatemala. Crossed and recrossed with South American corn, teosinte produced the elongated...
I.S.C.G.T.R.C. got started in 1943 when Earl May, a wealthy Iowa nurseryman, put up $75,000 for a five-year investigation of primitive corn. The following year a group of Guatemalan businessmen offered $150,000 to U.S. agricultural colleges for research work in Guatemala. Iowa State snapped up both offers...
...double-handful of Iowa State graduate students and undergraduate specialists will move into a spacious colonial mansion in Antigua. The Guatemalans have offered free use of the necessary land. If the planned cross-breeding experiments work out, both Iowa and Guatemala may soon have better, if not bigger corn...