Pioneer Hi-Bred - History

History

In 1926, farm journal editor and future U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace, along with a group of Des Moines, Iowa businessmen, founded the "Hi-Bred Corn Company". At the time, most corn farmers saved part of the seed from the harvest and used this to plant a crop the following year. Wallace had been experimenting with hybridization of corn and became convinced that hybrid seed corn would become important. His vision proved accurate; by 1940 more than 90 percent of the corn raised in North America was raised from hybrid seed. During the first year of production, the company produced 1000 bushels of seed and sold 650 bushels.

Read more about this topic:  Pioneer Hi-Bred

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
    —Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)

    “In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    “If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
    —Josiah Royce (1855–1916)