Paul Edmiston, age 10, of Danville, I11., for his question:
WHERE WAS CORN FIRST GROWN?
Botanists say that corn first grew somewhere in North America and that it is a native to this hemisphere. No one in Europe knew about corn before Columbus sailed to America in 1492.
Fossilized pollen grains from corn plants found in Mexico may be more than 60,000 years old. Ears of corn about the size of strawberries have been discovered in Mexico and may be about 3,000 years old.
When early explorers arrived from Europe, they found that American Indians were growing corn all the way from Canada to the southern tip of South America. The Indians grew almost all of the main types of corn that are raised today.
Indian corn included many varieties. Some had red, blue, pink or black kernels. Some kernels had bands, spots or stripes. The kernels varied in size from no larger than a grain of rice to as big as a nickel.
Corn played an important part in the religious life of many American Indian tribes. They held elaborate ceremonies when planting and harvesting it and used corn patterns to decorate pottery, sculpture and other works of art.
Indians showed the early settlers from Europe how to grow corn. Corn became very important to the pioneers. Often the early colonists used corn as money. Sometimes they paid their rent, taxes or debts in corn.
Until about 1900, corn grown in the United States and Canada was not much different from some of the corn grown by the Indians. But then the farmers started selecting only the best seeds for planting, and the quality of corn improved greatly.
In the early 1900s, farmers started pollinating corn by hand. They improved the yield of corn by selecting good plants to breed. An American geneticist named George Shull produced the first hybrids in 1905 while studing heredity in corn.
It wasn't until 1933 that hybrid corn came into common use. Since then, and to this day, scientists continue to try to improve the quality of corn by breeding new hybrids.
The development of hybrid corn and improved farming methods helped increase the United States' corn production from about 25 bushels per acre in the early 1930s to more than 90 bushels per acre.
Total production of corn increased from about 2.3 billion bushels of corn a year in the early 1930s to about three times that amount today.
Improved machinery lets farmers plant, cultivate and pick more corn. Fertilization and crop rotation improve the soil and increase the crop yield. Also helping to improve corn crops are the new insect killing chemicals that destroy many insect pests that attack corn plants.
Farmers usually plant field corn in the early spring, about to days after the average date of the season's last severe frost.