Karin Matchett, “At Odds over Inbreeding: An Abandoned Attempt at Mexico/United States Collaboration to ‘Improve’ Mexican Corn, 1940-1950,” Journal of the History of Biology 39, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 345-372.

[ABSTRACT] – “During the first years of organized agricultural research in Mexico in the 1940s, two agencies ran separate programs for corn improvement. The Rockefeller Foundation’s OFfice of Special STudies and the Mexican government’s Office of Experiment Stations (later called the Agricultural Research Institute) carried out research on corn with distinct aims and methods. That they differed strongly is well established in the literature. Many authors have discussed a Rockefeller Foundation program that reportedly emphasized hybrid corn, a technical choice that embodied a preference for assisting wealthy farmers who could afford hybrid corn and the necessary agricultural inputs. Conversely, these authors attribute to the Mexican program a focus on open-pollinated corn, which presumably manifested its concern for Mexico’s small farmers who saved seed. This article argues that the reverse was true. The Rockefeller Foundation program initially was committed to a type of improved open-pollinated corn while the Mexican program proceeded with a strict, U.S.-style hybrid program. I try to illuminate each group’s priority on yield, as well as additional significant, and complicating, breeding priorities that precluded any collaboration between the two.”

Notes

• 346 – “Taboada directed the Mexican Office of Experiment STations and was the architect of the corn improvement program already in place when the Rockefeller Foundation scientists arrived in 1943. All three men envisioned a seamless merging of the two groups’ staffs, goals, and collections of corn. Technicians at the Mexican experiment stations would provide the Rockefeller Foundation program with inbred lines, and the RF staff would evaluate the most promising lines from the experiment stations as well as their own liens from recent collections.”
• “In this scenario, the RF scientists aimed to serve wealthy, commercial Mexican farmers who wanted to modernize their farms, adopt hybrid corn, and commit to purchasing inputs and hybrid seed every year. Conversely, the Mexican national program is usually described as having focused on open-pollinated corn with reusable seed, the type of corn that small farmers had propagated for millennia, in order to serve Mexico’s humble corn growers.”
• 347 – “In Mexico, however, the dichotomy between the categories of modern, scientific, hybrid, and high yielding, on the one hand, and traditional, open-pollinated, and only-moderately yielding on the other, crumbled by the 1950s. Two areas of methodological innovation in corn improvement in Mexico have remained virtually invisible, cloaked in the assumptions established by conventional U.S. hybrid corn. To uncover these, I depart from the yes-or-no questions of hybrid or open-pollinated corn and explore the distinct, often contradictory priorities that occupied the close second place after yield for each group of breeders. These had a decisive impact on how the breeding programs were carried out, the kind of corn that resulted, and the ease (or difficulty) with which breeders in the two programs could work together and ultimately offer any sort of improvement to farmers.”
• [SECTION: INBREEDING AND HYBRIDIZATION IN CORN]
• 348-9 – History of inbreeding – Darwin, Archibald Dixon Shamel, George Shull, Edward Murray East
• 349 – “. . . Shull determined that naturally cross-fertilized species such as corn were indeed composed of innumerable pure lines. Although he had little professional or personal connection to formers, he nevertheless spoke to the practical importance of this discovery. In Shull’s view, a field of corn was made up of as many hybridizations of pure lines as there were corn plants. Corn breeders would do well, he thought, to identify the optimal, most desirable of these hybridizations and create entire commercial fields of them.”
• 351-2 – “Double cross hybrids made it into the rich soil of the corn belt of the United States and synthetics did not. Double cross hybrids dominated the landscape and the market because both farmers and seed companies found them advantageous. Hybrids offered farmers high enough yields to offset the higher price they paid for seed . . .. The seed of double cross hybrids was also inexpensive enough to produce that private seed companies were willing to invest. In Mexico, however, the balance of these and other factors was dramatically different. There, Mexican and U.S. breeders expanded on, modified, and mixed the methods associated with hybrids as well as synthetics.”
• 353 – “The second major development during the Cardenas administration was the creation of the Instituto Biotechnico. . . . The Instituto had a Section of Plant Genetics and a botanical laboratory, although the main interests of its leader, Enrique Beltran, lay in the zoological realm rather than the botanical. For six years, researchers at the Instituto explored the evolutionary history of corn and discussed the possibilities of using this knowledge to create new, more useful varieties of corn.”
• “At the experiment stations as well as the Instituto Biotechnico, ‘improvement’ was nearly synonymous with inbreeding. At the Instituto Biotecnico researchers used inbreeding to investigate the evolutionary history of corn and to create new varieties, as well as address their concern about peasants’ livelihoods and cultural progress.”
• 354 – “For Gandara, the task of the agricultural researcher was to disentangle the various traits and recombine them to form new optimal varieties. He wrote, ‘for lack of any selection based on technical knowledge or good judgment, the peasant does not separate the seed of these varieties, but rather creates a mixture because he does not know how to distinguish them. Due to this, the corn that is harvested is the result of more than 200 variations whose characteristics we must study and experiment with in order to fix those variations of characters that are beneficial for corn production.’ Gandara thought that researchers could extract from these varieties virtually every trait demanded by Mexican conditions: corn that was ‘early-maturing, late-maturing, frost resistant, flood resistant, drought resistant, tolerant of salinated or defective soils, and additionally, corn appropriate for soils that were clay, sandy, [or] calcareous … etc.’”
  • So the pre-Rockefeller Mexican program always had an understanding of hyperlocalized breeding, not universalizing, but apparently preferred double cross inbred hybridizing?
• 355 – “Historical documents are sparse, but it is probable that despite the many years of work and some degree of collaboration with farmers, Khankhoje’s new varieties were not released to farmers in great numbers, if at all.”
• 356 – “To import corn, Mexico’s dietary staple and cultural centerpiece, from the United States not only dented the government’s budget but bruised its pride as well. But for several years in the middle of the 1930, Mexico’s corn harvests met domestic demand. Gandara celebrated this achievement, while noting that out of the several factors behind low yields that were possible to address, the one still largely ignored was ‘agricultural knowledge appropriate for our soils and climates.’”
• “Thus, through inbreeding and hybridization, scientists at the Instituto Biotecnico tried simultaneously to solve scientific, economic, social, and cultural problems.”
• 356-7 – “He [Eduardo Limon] and his collaborators began a hybrid corn program modeled after those in the United States. They formed thousands of inbred lines at La Huerta, using local corn varieties as well as varieties they collected in the United States or were sent by U.S. breeders.”
• 358 – “Taboada instructed the staff at each station to collect four local ‘representative’ varieties, undertake mass selection procedures, and begin inbreeding. They retained ninety-nine of the most desirable plants from each inbreeding generation with which to continue the inbreeding process. Within eight years they hoped to have several double cross hybrids adapted to the major corn-growing regions of Mexico.”
• 360 – [SECTION: SCIENTIFIC CORN IMPROVEMENT AT THE OFFICE OF SPECIAL STUDIES: SHORT TERM RESULTS]
• “Not all corn improvers in Mexico considered inbreeding and pure corn as the fundamental components of corn improvement, however. Breeders from the United States followed a quite different line of corn improvement logic.”
• “Whereas hybrid corn adoption had served this purpose brilliantly in the United States during the previous ten years, they believed that to immediately associate hybrid corn with higher production was unreasonable in Mexico in the 1940s. The tight association seen in the United States among hybrid corn, high per-acre yield, and increased national corn production was not feasible in subsistence agriculture or even among Mexico’s commercial farmers. They thought (with good reason) that few farmers in Mexico could afford to purchase hybrid corn seed every year and knew that they would need ten years to develop a well-adapted hybrid. But since any farmer potentially could be convinced to adopt a new open-pollinated variety, they planned at the outset to rely on higher-yielding open-pollinated corn to bolster Mexican corn production and held out tentative hopes that farmers might adopt hybrids in the future.”
  • All of this without any citation
• 362 – “In Texas in the late 1930s, Mangelsdorf was exposed to the evolving question of hot to conduct corn improvement in a region where adapted hybrids were difficult to breed and farmers were hesitant to plant them. In Mexico, there were even more entrenched barriers to farmer’s adoption of conventional corn hybrids, so when putting together the preliminary plan for corn improvement at the Office of Special Studies, Mangelsdorf entertained a range of options that centered around the formation of open-pollinated synthetic varieties. He hoped that synthetics would reach farmers’ fields in Mexcio, rather than being confined to experimental fields as they had in the United States.”
• “Synthetic varieties were formed with inbred lines, just as hybrids were, but they could be propagated through open pollination without a decline in yielding ability. A synthetic variety was more variable than a double cross hybrid because it was descended from many inbred lines, rather than just four, and those lines were allowed to intercross randomly just as an open-pollinated variety would.”
• 363 – “To use early-generation lines was very attractive to breeders in Mexico who felt intense time pressure. But to intercross several inbred lines as Jenkins proposed would require that all of the lines were of at least decent quality. Mangelsdorf doubted this would be possible in the first few years, therefore, he proposed forming synthetic varieties by crossing only two inbred lines with two unmodified open-pollinated varieties: [inbred line x open-pollinated variety] x [inbred line x open-pollinated variety].”
• 354 – “Once the corn collections reached Chapingo, the corn samples embarked on a four-part process that involved mass selection on each variety, inbreeding, evaluating and recombining the inbred lines to form synthetic varieties, and assessing the suitability of the new synthetic varieties in different environments.”
• “Although the leaders of corn improvement programs at both the Mexican Office of Experiment Stations and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Office of Special Studies devoted their research programs to a common goal of improving Mexico’s corn production and Mexican farmers’ livelihoods, and despite the carefully laid out cooperative corn improvement plan of 1944, they failed to join forces. As the decade of the forties wore on, it became apparent that the kind of advice offered by OSS staff was often not welcome, particularly at the Leon station. It is not difficult to see why. To the Mexican breeders, for whom ‘purifying’ local corn varieties was central to the scientific breeder’s task, the OSS plan to test and utilize inbred lines while still tremendously variable bordered on absurd. Likewise, the Office of Experiment Stations’ approach of using several years to take the inbred lines to a high level of purity before crossing them (and then, indeed, planning to form conventional double cross hybrids) seemed hopelessly impractical to the OSS staff.”
• 366-7 – “But it quickly became apparent that the logic of the OSS breeders failed to match that of most corn growers. The physical differences between highly-inbred lines — such as were used by breeders in the United States — and the early-generation lines employed at the OSS were striking ,as was their behavior when crossed. In contrast to the uniformity of highly-inbred lines, the plants in an early-generation inbred line still possessed much of the variability of the open-pollinated variety from which it came — individuals stood at different heights, they had ears at a [sic] different points along the stalk, some ears bore much seed while others had less. Furthermore, the lines that were crossed to form a synthetic were often native to different environments within Mexico; the resulting synthetic varieties were therefore even more variable than farmers’ original varieties (or variable in different respects). While farmers’ unmechanized corn cultivation might not have required absolutely uniform corn fields, the farmers nonetheless demanded more uniformity than synthetics displayed.”
  • Is she suggesting that the Mexican farmers rejected the OSS product simply because they didn’t like how it looked? Also, why is the entirety of her evidence for all of this the uncritically-examined words of Wellhausen and Mangelsdorf?
• 367 – [CONCLUSION]
• “The early synthetic varieties formed at the Office of Special Studies have disappeared from collective memory, just as the hybrid corn program at the Mexican Office of Experiment Stations has. Historians and other commentators have been misled by fault assumptions inspired by our understanding (also incomplete) of hybrid corn development in the United States. Only two kinds of corn have been entertained for the period under study: U.S.-style hybrid corn (formed through extensive inbreeding and hybridization) and open-pollinated corn formed through the much older method of mass selection. High yields and ‘modern’ methods have been strongly associated only with the hybrids, and hybrids in turn have been linked primarily with the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Office of Special Studies. Conversely, the Mexican program has been firmly coupled with open-pollinated corn, presumably achieved through older selection methods. We must (as the breeders did) throw out the strict dichotomy between hybrid and open-pollinated corn, if we are to understand the early years of scientific corn improvement in Mexico.”
• 368 – “The practicality of the Mexican breeders was of a different sort. Taboada and Limon valued a longer term breeding process centered around extensive inbreeding that would eventually lead to double cross hybrids and higher per-acre yields (although not necessarily result in significantly higher production overall, given that relatively few farmers would be able to cultivate them). Not only were they not bothered by the time consuming process, this aspect was desirable because it demonstrated their professional wherewithal [to counteract the“Mexican vice” of being quitters apparently].”
  • Is she fucking serious?