Long before history began to be recorded, man strove constantly to get plants that would produce greater amounts of food with less labor. Sometimes he obtained this improvement by increasing the food-producing ability of an existing plant, at other times by selecting a more capable new plant. Hybrid corn is the greatest example in recent time of increasing the value of a food-bearing plant by improving one already in common use. The development of hybrid corn is truly one of the most important advances made in all the thousands of years since man first began cultivating special food-bearing plants.
What is hybrid corn, and how does it differ from the corn grown before it was developed?