Seed Corn Fields
Seed corn fields are planted in a repetitive pattern known as a "panel", "block" or "set" depending on the area of the country. There are two main planting patterns for these panels. A panel may be planted in a 6:2 pattern where six "female" rows, the rows to be detasseled, are followed by two "male" or "bull" rows, the rows that will be used to pollinate the detasseled rows. Panels are also commonly planted in a 4:1 ratio with four female rows followed by a single male row. Other, less common, patterns are also used including 4:2 and 4:1:6:1. In all cases the pattern is continued throughout the corn field. (Smith 2004, pp. 584)
All or portions of seed corn fields may be surrounded by extra rows of male plants if it is likely that wind may carry foreign pollen into the seed corn field. These extra rows are called "buffer" or "isolation" rows depending on the area of the country. Another important aspect to keeping undesirable pollen out of seed corn fields is a process known as roguing, a process that removes plants that differ from the variety intentionally planted.
Read more about this topic: Detasseling
Famous quotes containing the words seed, corn and/or fields:
“I care not by what measure you end the war. If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America, whatever may be your object, depend upon it, as true as effect follows cause, that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers, and poison the fair fruits of freedom. Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.”
—Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892)
“The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,
And it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)
“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)