July was “d’tasslin’ time.” The sun was never quite so hot as in those long days of endless corn rows. We methodically walked that gauntlet of razor-sharp leaves with the hope that — after all the bugs, bites and blisters — we would stand with the blue-ribbon for best-bred corn at the county fair.
And Grandpa told of the November nights when the prize ears at harvest were taken from the seed box on the wagon. Carefully shelled, culled, and dried under the bed, the best kernels were then sacked away for springtime planting.
We sometimes won that blue-ribbon for pure-bred corn. And the largest ribbon, with its gold letters, is still used as a bookmark in the old family Bible.
But today, some scientists are warning that our practices of breeding hybrids for purity and uniformity are destroying the very genetic traits in corn which could protect us from great crop catastrophes tomorrow. As hybrids spread around the globe, the gene pool is being drained of numbers of resistant plant varieties. Through time, plants and their predator diseases constantly adapt to one another. When attacked by diseases, plants respond by mutating — producing an offspring that is resistant to the disease.
In today’s agriculture, plants are not allowed to mutate. Instead each year they are grown from newly purchased, high yielding seeds. Indeed, the average “life” of hybrid Mexican corn — until a new pestilence finds its genetic weakness — is only four years. The mutation of diseases cannot be stopped. And genetic engineers in some regions are finding themselves in a quickening race with famine, a race their hybrids are not likely to have strength enough to finish. Nearly three-fourths of the corn planted in the United States is of only six varieties out of the 197 varieties adapted to growing somewhere in this country.
On midwestern farms, the seed company is usually represented by a neighbor, in his green and gold cap, sitting at the kitchen table taking a springtime order for DeKalb, Pioneer or other hybrid seed corn. More than two million bushels of this seed were sold to corn farmers last year.
More than one half of the sixty-eight million acres which United States farmers planted in corn last year were planted with varieties from only two companies, Pioneer International Hi-Bred and DeKalb. While Pioneer claims a slight edge, holding twenty-eight percent of the domestic seed corn market, these two firms clearly dominate a field of some twenty major seed corn companies which include Cargill, Trojan (a subsidiary of Pfizer Drugs), Ferry-Morse (a subsidiary of Purex) and Northrup-King (a subsidiary of Sandoz of Switzerland).
DeKalb claims that more than twenty million United States acres are planted with the hybrid corn products of its laboratories which are sold by some 7,000 farmer-dealers in the countryside.
Profits are climbing even faster than acreage planted. Pioneer, the seed corn leader, showed 1975 sales from its corn business alone of more than 124 million dollars, more than twice its volume just five years ago. And DeKalb reports a 22 percent increase this year over the first nine months’ earnings of 1976.
From such bloated sales, the seed industry makes a very attractive 15 percent average annual return on investment. However all these profits are not put back into producing high quality seeds or into the research needed for more insurance against blights and pestilence. Instead, major seed companies have chosen to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in acquiring other profitable companies around the world.
These behemoth companies are rapidly absorbing many of the smaller, local family owned corn seed companies in the United States. These small companies used the careful records of yield, input, volume, and other research which midwestern farmers have for years compiled to produce locally adapted seed varieties. Yet, as these giant seed companies have expanded, they have dramatically reduced the varieties of seed available.
In addition to large U.S. firms, other purchasers of smaller seed companies include giant European based multinationals. The largest single direct-foreign investment in the United States in 1976 was made, not by Arabs looking for farm land, but by the Swiss agrichemical firm, Sandoz, in a 191 million dollar purchase of the Minneapolis-based Northrup-King, one of the world’s top five grain seed producers.
Other multinational buyers of seed companies have been petro-chemical firms, such as Royal Dutch Shell, producing herbicides and pesticides; drug manufacturers like Ciba-Geigy; breeders of animal stock such as Anderson Clayton; or financial investors like International Telephone and Telegraph.
Can these firms be expected to protect the genetic diversity of regional crops when that genetic strength is in competition with their currently promoted variety? Can they be expected to develop seeds or hybrids which reproduce themselves at full vigor?
Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.
Close inbreeding to foster genetic traits that enhance production has generally been viewed as a blessing. Corn yield has increased more than three times since 1929, much of this due to inbreeding. Without these greater yields, food prices would likely be higher today.
Hybrid corn can be planted closer together, make more efficient use of fertilizer, be planted earlier. Its plants are shorter, and stalks stronger, and it can be cultivated more easily and harvested quickly with larger combines.
But as larger and larger areas were planted to a single genotype, rapid pest spread was a certainty.
In the past 15 years, the genetic weakness inherent with fewer varieties of corn have brought disastrous results to several corn producing areas of the country.
The maize dwarf mosaic virus of 1964 did heavy damage to many eastern farmers. Ohio, alone, suffered more than five million dollars in losses. In that same year, the corn stunt mycoplasma attacks in the deep south devastated some areas so thoroughly that regions such as the Yazoo Delta still suffer from reduced corn production. The “phyllosticta” leaf blight of 1968 and the eyespot leaf blight of 1970 hurt farmers who had planted the genetically weak hybrids. Concluding its 1972 study of this constant barrage of corn pestilences, the National Academy of Sciences declared, “Many of the striking reductions in our hybrid corn base were well established before 1960. It is possibly not accidental that all our serious widespread corn epidemics have occurred since that date.”
Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.
The most destructive force to hit the U.S. corn crop during the period was the T-male sterile cytoplasma disease called the “southern corn blight of 1970.”
Clouds of black spores boiled up around combines in southern corn fields in the fall of 1970 and a grayish powder was left in their tire tracks. Little corn, however, was carried to the bins. In some Gulf-coast states more than 50 percent of the corn harvest was lost. Nationwide a 15 percent decrease in production was attributed to this southern corn blight.
The blight’s origin was quickly traced to a part of the hybrid seed, the male sterile cytoplasm, which was being heavily marketed by nearly all the major seed companies. The weakness of this “T” or “Texas-cytoplasm” (named after the two Texans who developed it) was first seen when blight hit the February crops in Florida. Blown northward through the waves of greening corn, by July nearly all southern and midwestern corn fields had been touched by the blight. Through the summer of 1970 the corn futures market quivered like an aspen in the wind. Wall Street’s attention was captured more certainly than by the Legionnaires disease or the swine flu, and hotel conference rooms were filled by conclaves of concerned agronomists, plant pathologists, geneticists, entomologists and government officials.
Historically, United States corn had been too variable to give a new strain of pestilence such a firm foothold. However, during 1969, the major seed companies were in a headlong push toward total use of the male sterile cytoplasm.
The reason? They saw the chance to reduce their costs by eliminating much of the field labor involved in seed corn production. Cross-pollination in a corn field is eased due to the separation of the plant — of the tassel carrying the male pollen and the silks which each lead to a potential kernel embryo. Fertilization occurs when the pollen lands on a silk and extends a little tube through the silk to fertilize the embryo kernel. Pollination control, for cross breeding purposes, means removing tassels from a seed-bearing parent to prevent self-pollination. This is the mid-July hand-labor task performed by thousands of midwestern high school students and migrant workers. Row-by-row, thousands of acres were annually detasseled, thus allowing wind pollination from selected male parents planted nearby.
This hand labor seemed unnecessary after the development of a male sterile cytoplasm during the mid-1950s. The tassels were made genetically infertile by crossing the female line with this source of male sterility. Then the male line was genetically restored to the degree that the female parent produced a seed from which a pollen-producing plant came the following year.
Then came the decision by the seed industry to use the Texas-male sterile cytoplasm almost exclusively. The disaster of the 1970 corn blight has now brought some greater diversity in the cytoplasm.
As seed companies increasingly utilized the T-cytoplasm for their hybrids, several scientists warned of the dangers of such dominance by one single source of cytoplasm. Among others, a major corn scientists’ journal, “Maize Genetics” published the well researched concerns about T-cytoplasm of two Philippino scientists. Many heard, yet no one acted. Why?
Despite these warnings from at home and abroad, the scientific voice was muted in the noisy rush of industry to push their T-cytoplasm based hybrids. The seed companies decided to market that genetically-weak 1969 crop of seed corn. And when it was planted in 1970, many southern fields were left in tatters.
By spring time in 1971, only one-fourth of the seed corn on hand was of varieties resistant to the southern blight. These were generally varieties where smaller breeders had, fortunately, continued their detasseling by hand. Farmers brought multi-million dollar class action law suits against the major seed firms and government investigations began within several agencies. Hoping to avoid a strong public outcry against their negligence, to lessen the threat of governmental regulation and another corn crop failure, the seed companies accepted the creation of a southern “buffer zone” against any recurring blight. Almost all their blight resistant corn was then sent south.
With little resistant seed corn to sell, many midwestern dealers were hard hit. Others simply raised the price of their seeds. And some farmers found themselves paying two to three times the market price in a very active midwestern black market in resistant corn seed.
In their international testing facilities in Latin America, Europe and Hawaii, United States seed companies quickly reinstituted production of seed corn without the fatal T-cytoplasm. And drier weather of 1970-71 continued to slow the spread of blight.
Washington officials and New York brokerage houses began to breathe easier. The United States corn crop, at that time, had a world market value of $7 billion. A shortfall of even one percent meant some $70 million less in needed foreign exchange.
In the domestic foods industry, the tremors continued. Corn accounts for over 70 percent of all grain fed to beef, and dairy cattle, hogs, and poultry. The government could do little to appease angry consumers after prices rose rapidly on these foods.
This last major corn blight hit hardest in our southern states. But an epidemic striking our major corn states — Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska — would bring widespread disaster to economies around the world.
Were the force of a southern corn blight to hit in Peru, Kenya, Guatemala or other nations whose people obtain more than half their calories from corn, the results could have been mass famine. Even today it would take about five years to redevelop regionally strong crops in event of a disaster among the hybrids which dominate almost all of our fields.
For American farms, markets would also be lost. Our largest single corn customers are the nations of the European Economic Community, principally Spain, Holland, W. Germany and Italy. The EEC buys more than half of our exported corn. But our large single-nation customers like Japan and China would also turn to other regions to fill their corn needs.
Where would they go to find blight-free corn? Many of our corn customers have already gone to developing nations. In order to secure their grain supply in areas where land and labor prices are lower than in the United States, they have bought not only corn but also invested in corn producing land. Usually the best soils available, these lands are thus not used to meet local food needs.
Wherever they travel, corn buyers will find the same United States seed firms also dominating the international market. With the arrival of these United States seed companies, corn buyers will find a restricting of the genetic base in these developing nations. And our former customers will then see the cost of corn begin to climb in these nations as the miracle seeds demand more costly inputs of water, fertilizer and other chemicals.
Turning principally to Latin America, to Brazil and Argentina, they would find United States firms already strong forces in the seed market. Indeed, more than 65 percent of Argentina’s corn crop comes from DeKalb seeds alone, while Pioneer has experienced, in the past year, a 22 percent increase in its Latin American sales of seed corn. These firms are opening up new Latin American facilities each year.
Almost all food crops now grown in western industrialized nations have their genetic birthplace in some eight major “gene centers” or regions of extreme plant genetic diversity. All of these gene centers are in underdeveloped nations. Corn, or maize, is native to the highlands of Central and South America; soybeans spring from northeast China, wheat from southwestern Asia and rice from southeast Asia. Now the genetic diversity within these gene centers is greatly endangered.
Of the world’s people, 95 percent depend on wheat, rice or corn directly for their major sustenance. There is no short-term substitute possible. And genetic failure in just one grain would be a horror.
Yet in the global gene centers, every hybrid advance which knocks an indigenous variety out of cultivation also increases the risks faced by our already vulnerable food supply.
In the last decade, United States seed exports have increased by 300 percent and grown into a $100 million industry. Most companies, however, are constructing facilities and test plots within these developing nations. With a terrifying single-mindedness, they are intent on “penetrating the market” of these gene centers. Governments, particularly in those wealthier industrialized nations dependent on gene center strength, are promoting few effective activities to preserve these vitally diverse plant populations.
“Foreign markets are opening slowly,” says J. Kenneth King, of the giant Northrup-King, “but they are extremely attractive.”
The seed businesses readily lends itself to internationalization. In the global view of the multinational corporation, the primary purpose of agricultural investment is not to produce food, but to use rapidly, or waste, other high-profit industrial products. From this perspective, the new seeds are indeed “miracles” which require an unending and expensive array of new machinery, fertilizers, fuels and other chemicals. And in Green Revolution areas of irrigated corn production in Latin America, raising the necessary volume of scarce water resources demands other high capital expenditures. As a result of this “miracle” many small farmers have been unable to purchase the inputs for the new seeds.
Though the 1970 corn blight demonstrated the dangers of genetic uniformity, food industry research and processing continue to promote this deadly uniformity. The increasing vulnerability of our corn crop to epidemics is not likely to generate self-correcting tendencies in our economically concentrated marketplace.
In its 1972 report, “Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops,” the National Academy of Sciences observed:
“The corn breeder must produce Dent corn in Iowa but Flint corns in India. The lettuce breeder must produce a Great Lakes heading type, the pea breeder an Alaskan or Perfection type . . . and so on. Clearly the market wants uniformity. If one breeder or one farmer fails to provide it, the market will turn to another that will.”
Though more scientific man-years are devoted to corn than to any other crop, we are yet unable to prevent the series of crippling corn diseases which have struck our hybrids. Except for the crisis-research around male sterile cytoplasm, we still have, according to the USDA, no techniques for measuring all of those cytoplasmic differences we discovered so crucial in the southern blight.
In the 1960s, the USDA spent less than $3 million annually for seed research in our land grant colleges. That is less than the expenditure for seed corn research alone in one of the major seed companies today.
Still more than half of the plant breeding work in our public institutions is directed to uniform yield and pest resistance, while less than ten percent is geared to other quality factors such as genetic diversity or nutritional content of hybrids.
“These priorities,” the Academy observed, “result largely from the demands of industry and the limitation of research resources.”
Our research and collection of maize (corn) varieties is fortunately the most advanced of all grains. Initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s, the maize collection is primarily housed in Mexico City at CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramento de Maiz Y Trigo), the Andean collection at ICA (Instituto Colombiano Agrapuecerio) and the eastern South America collection at Paracicaba, Brazil. The major center for corn seed collection in the United States is the public depository at the National Seed Storage Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Each of these centers suffers from insufficient budgets, lack of security within the collections and irregular testing of seed stock for viability. Seeds must be maintained in humidity and temperature controlled environments, and in nations where electric power is notoriously unreliable, there are few long-term back-up generating systems or alternative refrigeration.
Many of these collected varieties have already gone out of production in the fields. The collections hold the only existing stock. For security and research we need duplicate full collections of our maize stock in scattered locations around the globe. And there is needed, within the scientific community, a strong encouragement to use these stocks for research and field experimentation.
The financial and political papers of the nation are held under tight security, with duplicates, in case of war, in underground vaults. However, the seed stock necessary for survival is left almost to chance.
Our major facility, the Seed Storage Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado was begun in 1958 and has remained a neglected after-thought in the USDA budget since that time. Last year its total budget was raised to $300,000. There is little wonder that the laboratory holds just 10,000 of the hundreds of thousands of locally adapted varieties in the United States.
We take better care to preserve the semen of prize cattle than we do to preserve the seed stock of the grasses and grains without which the animals would perish.
