WI/CH: True-breeding corn over hybrid

I was rereading biologist Richard Lewontin's book Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA a while back. Related to its basic thesis of evolutionary biology being misused, Lewontin noted several examples of the current scientific discourse that he felt demonstrated the social context behind seemingly inevitable biological advances.

The biggest one he pointed out was the development of hybrid corn in the United States. But rather than being a necessary step forward in the science of practical ideology, he argues that hybridization represents a clear socio-economic factor driving the path of biological research.

The simple fact is that choosing first gen hybrid plants over breeding new true-breeding strains is, rather bluntly, rent-seeking behavior on the part of seed farms and researchers. This is because it requires a farmer to keep purchasing new seed every year to keep the increased yields, as second gen offspring of those hybrids will display a mix of traits, reducing aggregate yields.

Developing new true-breeding strains from such first gen hybrids would be a trivial upfront cost in the long run, and would improve the efficiency of agriculture by removing the seed farm apparatus necessary to sustain the higher yields. But any firm that developed it would quickly destroy its own market, leading to considerable incentives to maintain the low equilibrium through rent-seeking behavior. Hence, first gen hybrids being sold to farmers year after year.

Lewontin notes that nothing in biology prevented the higher equilibrium. It was pure economics. So my challenge is for Green Revolution and its forbears to stray away from hybrids for true-breeding strains, and also to ask what the far reaching effects that might have.
 
Are you referring to current farmers or previous generations? I'm not exactly sure what Henry Wallace's sales procedures were back in the early days of Pioneer. (Which is why people need to pay more attention to his agricultural work...)
 
Are you referring to current farmers or previous generations? I'm not exactly sure what Henry Wallace's sales procedures were back in the early days of Pioneer. (Which is why people need to pay more attention to his agricultural work...)
Previous generations. Though what modern biotech companies do with genetically modified crops is just a more sophisticated version of the same business strategy.
 
I don't think its possible because of incentives, unless the same people developing the seeds were also the farmers directly using them. Otherwise, they have no incentive to do so, and they'll lose too much money.
 
It's to note on the very related and larger subject that the biological farming, peasants farmers and all movement is as a whole something kinda like an anti-Green revolution, a deep critic of the ecological price of it...
 
I don't think its possible because of incentives, unless the same people developing the seeds were also the farmers directly using them. Otherwise, they have no incentive to do so, and they'll lose too much money.
Obviously. It would obvious be necessary to have considerable public funding of agricultural research. Maybe as a consequence of Populists or Farmer-Labor type groups taking power at the state level in the Midwest and other major agricultural states.
 
Obviously. It would obvious be necessary to have considerable public funding of agricultural research. Maybe as a consequence of Populists or Farmer-Labor type groups taking power at the state level in the Midwest and other major agricultural states.

This entire situation is an interesting study in market flaws, if not market failure, because it shows a situation where a less efficient method will be adopted, as the more efficient will kill one's business.

To topic, I don't think public funds would necessarily fix it, unless no one profits from the arrangement, which is ludicrous. Public funds, after all, pay for high tech R&D all the time with military spending, which has lead to things like computers.
 
I'm not sure if I agree with the original post's statement. In my genetics class we had a unit on crops, and there are a lot of crops that are hybrids or weird, infertile polychromosomal things. And some of them (especially 6 chromosome wheat, as I recall) are quite old.

While there's something to be said for trying to develop better true-breeding strains, the fact of the matter is that it's pretty likely that hybrids are often going to be better in some way no matter what you do. Like, if you breed better draft horses, that's still going to lead to even better mules.
 
I'm not sure if I agree with the original post's statement. In my genetics class we had a unit on crops, and there are a lot of crops that are hybrids or weird, infertile polychromosomal things. And some of them (especially 6 chromosome wheat, as I recall) are quite old.

While there's something to be said for trying to develop better true-breeding strains, the fact of the matter is that it's pretty likely that hybrids are often going to be better in some way no matter what you do. Like, if you breed better draft horses, that's still going to lead to even better mules.
The problem was that said hybrids were often fertile hybrids. Which meant they could be developed into new true-breeding strains that would retain their advantages. Just like the orange fruit, btw, originally created by hybridizing two different citrus trees, likely the citron and the pomelo, and since developed into numerous different strains.
 
I'm not sure if I agree with the original post's statement. In my genetics class we had a unit on crops, and there are a lot of crops that are hybrids or weird, infertile polychromosomal things. And some of them (especially 6 chromosome wheat, as I recall) are quite old.

While there's something to be said for trying to develop better true-breeding strains, the fact of the matter is that it's pretty likely that hybrids are often going to be better in some way no matter what you do. Like, if you breed better draft horses, that's still going to lead to even better mules.

Yeah, I thought the OP sounded odd, so I googled it and this is what I found:

There is another area where Lewontin let his leftist egalitarian inclinations influence his genetics. This area is much more important to us in the seed business. Lewontin was a critic of the hybrid corn seed industry. Early on Lewontin in his career Lewontin had pointed out that in nature individual genes are under weak selection and that it is much easier to envision fitness selection on linkage blocks. When he criticized the hybrid seed corn business, he described the theories of heterosis as being the overdominance theory and the deleterious recessives theory. He then proceeds to reject the overdominance theory. Rejection of the importance of overdominance has proven to be correct. But he went on to conclude that recurrent selection population improvement would have been able to create self-pollinating populations which could perform as well as hybrids if the hybrid seed corn industry had not starved the public corn breeding programs for support starting in the 1920’s5. His conclusions don’t necessarily follow from his premises.
The weakness of this argument lies in the importance of linkage blocks, an importance which was identified in Lewontin’s earlier work. Corn yield and agronomic traits are controlled by many genes, as recent work with markers has confirmed. The number of these genes and the limited size of the genome require that many genes will be linked. In order to accumulate desirable genes in a population the linkage blocks have to be broken down and recombinant sets of desirable genes assembled on single chromosomes. That is much easier to say than it is to do. In applied breeding programs it is both effective to accumulate the improve linkage blocks in inbreds and it is also easier to cover up the fact that the improvement process will remain indefinitely incomplete by making hybrids covering up the places where the linkage blocks continue to contain deleterious genes. This was not nearly so clear in the academic world in 1986, even though applied plant breeders had figured it out. Lewontin sought to explain progress in hybrid breeding with a combination of genetic information and ideology, but the answer was located in economics. Recurrent selection was more expensive than it appeared.

Source

This is just a seed industry blog, so maybe he's wrong. But, considering what Lewontin's implying about guys like Henry Wallace and Norman Borlaug, I'd like some independent confirmation of the OP's claim that this is a practical approach.
 
This is just a seed industry blog, so maybe he's wrong. But, considering what Lewontin's implying about guys like Henry Wallace and Norman Borlaug, I'd like some independent confirmation of the OP's claim that this is a practical approach.
Practical enough to be the default strategy for thousands of years prior.

Regardless of how much more difficult the process would be, it is difficult to believe that it would somehow be less efficient in the long-run then maintaining a huge seed farm apparatus, consuming a considerable portion of the value of the increased yield through its normal operations in perpetuity.

The author you quoted seemed to fail to understand Lewontin's point. Because ideology is all part and parcel to economics. Hence, these researchers not taking paths of research that would put themselves out of business in the long-run, instead taking much more profitable roads for themselves while resulting a net decrease in efficiency.
 
Practical enough to be the default strategy for thousands of years prior.

We've more than doubled yield per acre over the last century. Not all of that is due to hybrid seed, but I think the claim that we could match that feat with traditional methods is a conclusion that requires justifying.

Regardless of how much more difficult the process would be, it is difficult to believe that it would somehow be less efficient in the long-run then maintaining a huge seed farm apparatus, consuming a considerable portion of the value of the increased yield through its normal operations in perpetuity.

I'm neither a biologist nor a farmer, but a certain percentage of the seed always needs to be reserved for planting next year, whether that's generated by special seed farms or by removal from the individual farmers' yield. Is there some reason that hybrid seeds require removal of a larger percentage of yield?

The author you quoted seemed to fail to understand Lewontin's point. Because ideology is all part and parcel to economics. Hence, these researchers not taking paths of research that would put themselves out of business in the long-run, instead taking much more profitable roads for themselves while resulting a net decrease in efficiency.

I have a very hard time believing that Henry Wallace or Norman Borlaug would pursue hybrid crops rather than true breeds because it would make them more money. That's not to say that all or even most agronomists are like them, but if Wallace and Borlaug pursued hybrids rather than true-breeders, I'm inclined to suspect they had a legitimate reason.
 
If if were that cheap to upgrade, developing the hybrid corn must be *seriously* expensive, or else there are other regulatory barriers to entry, or else seed corn is actually pretty darn cheap--or else you'd expect some new firm to market true breed corn or even a group of farmers to band together to pay for its development.

Which is a long way of saying that I suspect this guy's need to make a point has run a little ahead of the actual facts in this instance.

I was rereading biologist Richard Lewontin's book Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA a while back. Related to its basic thesis of evolutionary biology being misused, Lewontin noted several examples of the current scientific discourse that he felt demonstrated the social context behind seemingly inevitable biological advances.

The biggest one he pointed out was the development of hybrid corn in the United States. But rather than being a necessary step forward in the science of practical ideology, he argues that hybridization represents a clear socio-economic factor driving the path of biological research.

The simple fact is that choosing first gen hybrid plants over breeding new true-breeding strains is, rather bluntly, rent-seeking behavior on the part of seed farms and researchers. This is because it requires a farmer to keep purchasing new seed every year to keep the increased yields, as second gen offspring of those hybrids will display a mix of traits, reducing aggregate yields.

Developing new true-breeding strains from such first gen hybrids would be a trivial upfront cost in the long run, and would improve the efficiency of agriculture by removing the seed farm apparatus necessary to sustain the higher yields. But any firm that developed it would quickly destroy its own market, leading to considerable incentives to maintain the low equilibrium through rent-seeking behavior. Hence, first gen hybrids being sold to farmers year after year.

Lewontin notes that nothing in biology prevented the higher equilibrium. It was pure economics. So my challenge is for Green Revolution and its forbears to stray away from hybrids for true-breeding strains, and also to ask what the far reaching effects that might have.
 
It did take time to get hybrid corn to market. Wallace founded Pioneer in the 1920's. At one point, one woman could detassle all the hybrid corn in Iowa.
I know Wallace didn't get into hybrid corn for profit- though he did make money off it, eventually. (His family made more.) His original research was to show that corn's appearance was not necessarily a factor in corn production.
 
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