A Hybrid Saga

by

Lauren Roberts

The little bookmark is among the smallest I own. Just over an inch wide and one-half inch in height, it works simply but effectively by using its entire space to spell out “Pfister Hybrids,” the name of a company

Among the quintessential summer foods is corn on the cob. Regardless of how you like it—boiled, steamed, oven-baked, grilled, or microwaved, and served plain, with herb butter, salt, onion powder, sugar, pepper, Tabasco, Mexican style with Cotija cheese, a combination of chili/mayo/lime juice, a dry rub,  a Parmesan/garlic/olive oil paste, Cajun seasonings, fresh thyme—corn on the cob is a favorite with many.

Corn has a long history being a staple of diets around the world. In America, it was grown by Native Americans thousands of years before Europeans arrived on American shores. It was called maize. This vegetable is actually a grass that was domesticated centuries before Christopher Columbus arrived and began trading. One of the items he traded for was corn which he then took back to Spain and from whence it spread to the rest of Europe. Today it is one of the most widely grown crops in the Americas with 332 million metric tons (almost half the world’s harvest) grown annually in the U.S. alone.

Corn or maize is a member of the grass family, and is native to both North and South America. They Mayan, Aztec, and Inca Indians cultivated maize more than 5,500 years ago. It was an important crop for the early European settlers in America, and has been a staple of American diets since.

The vegetable is quite an efficient plant to start with. It transforms energy from the sun into stored chemical energy in its seeds. Though varieties of corn can vary from two feet to twenty, most of the corn grown in the Corn Belt of the U.S. is about eight feet tall. What all the varieties have in common is a basic arrangement of roots, stalk, leaves, seed structure and the compostion of the plant’s reproductive parts. On modern varieties, the seeds take about fifty-five days to produce a tassel at the top with between five and twenty branches. Each branch has hundreds of tiny spikelets or flowers, and within those pollen is produced by the male reproductive part or the anther. A few days later the plant germinates, producing the female part or the ear. At this stage, the ear contains about 1,000 ovules or potential kernels (that require pollen before they can grow into full kernels. The silk of the ear is composed of individual strands that grow out of the protecting husk near the top of the ear. Shortly after that, millions of grains of pollen are released and float down to the silks. If a grain of pollen hits a silk it travels down to fertilize the ovule. If it misses, a bare spot results. It takes about twenty-four hours for an entire field to be pollinated, which can be determined by the color change from golden to brown of the silks.

Charles Darwin’s proposals was a beginning of sorts for the hybrid revolution. The idea that species of plants and animals adapted over time to ensure their survival and would then pass those traits along to the next generation were already being used when Native Americans utilized the best ears of maize for seeds the following year. About the same time, in the 1860s, Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian priest and scientist, discovered he could cross breed different strains of pea plants and predict the traits of the offspring. He proposed the reason was based in genetics and that such things could be controlled. But his work attracted little attention at the time, and it wasn’t until the next century that it took root.

In 1906, a geneticist named G. H. Shull began experimenting with inherited traits in corn. What was noted in particular was the reduction in vigor on inbreeding and the restoration of it on cross-breeding. It was obvious that parentage was important, and that allowing nature to take her course did not provide that control. With manual selection over several generations, strains will become stable and superior. During the experimental phase of developing the inbred and hybrids, this control was achieved by covering the ear shoots and tassels with bags and transferring pollen by hand. This is how Lester Pfister got started.

Pfister was a farm boy, born to tenant farmers on July 6, 1897 near El  Paso, Illinois. He was the second son in the family. His father died when he was eight years old, leaving behind five children. Though Pfister attended school it was only through the eighth grade. At that time he hired himself out as a farm hand, working in the corn fields for $30 a month. This is when he also began to test different strains of corn and to record the results. When he showed those to an agent at the County Poor Farm, the agent, impressed with Pfister’s records, asked him to do a three-year testing of the Woodford County corn. Using a high-yield strain that had originally been developed by a farmer named Krug, Pfister worked to inbreed the corn. His method, using the aforementioned paper bags, was met with derisive laughter. It certainly must have been a sight to see a huge field of corn with bags covering row after row of corn tassels. And it nearly cost him everything. But his work paid off, and a 1949 Time magazine article told how:

Neighbors, watching him tie paper bags over corn tassels and ear shoots to control fertilization, called him “Crazy Lester.” To keep up his experiments he mortgaged everything he owned. When depression hit, he stalled off bankruptcy only by ducking meetings of his creditors. One day he went to an El Paso bank to plead for a last-ditch loan. Unwrapping a newspaper, he produced a ten-inch ear of corn, the best that any other Woodford County farmer had grown. Then he held up a handsome 14-inch ear of Pfister corn grown from hybrid seed. He got the loan.

Pfister at last hit upon a double-crossed hybrid that outyielded the original Krug so substantially that work, and corn, began to spread. In another five years he was grossing $1 million a year, had invented a detasseling machine and was named the “Outstanding Corn Breeder of the World” by Reader’s Digest and Life when Pfister was the biggest U.S. individual grower of hybrid seed corn and more than 26,000 corn belt farmers on more that five million acres from eastern Ohio to middle Nebraska used his seed corn.

“I’ll be happy,” he said in the Time article, “if I can contribute just a little that will take some more of the gamble out of farming. Subsidies and price supports will never do that. The only thing they contribute is progress toward socialized farming—and that’s the worst thing that could happen to this country.” He would be happy. On July 14, 2009, Pfister Hybrids, still going strong, was bought by Dow AgroSciences. In its press release, Dow noted that their acquisition will expand their U.S. seeds business.

As for the booklet upon which the little bookmark rests, it is a reprint of an article published in the Chicago Sun on May 31, 1947. Written by Milburn P. Akers, it is full of pictures of the area, the farm, the corn and different hybrids.

Here us a cornfield saga—the story of Lester Pfister.

Back in the ‘20s, when the corn belt  was prosperous, Pfister wasn’t. In fact he almost lost his Woodford County farm by foreclosure. In the ‘30s, when the corn belt was broke, Pfister wasn’t. Instead, he was on the high road (whiich he had found down between the corn rows on his farm) to success.

Today, both the corn belt and Pfister are prosperous. But if Lester Pfister, 50 years old, slight in build, gray-haired, bespectacled and soft spoken, is more prosperous than most of his neighbors that is only compensation for the years he spent seeking a better seed corn.

The bookmark itself is still in the same place it came to me, hooked over the front cover of the booklet. I have no doubt the company obtained permission from the Sun to reprint the article into the booklet, which they bundled with these tiny metal bookmarks, and sent out to current and prospective customers. How fortunate I feel to have this undamaged though obviously used bookmark—and its own book—as part of my collection!

Bookmark specifications: Pfister Hybrids
Dimensions: 1 1/4" x 1/2"
Material: Metal, painted
Manufacturer: Pfister
Date: 1947-8
Acquired: eBay

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately the same number of books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.