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 world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.
    —G.M. (George Macaulay)

    All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)