FrankenCorn

"Peaches and Cream! My husband and I don't eat genetically modified food; where's the yellow corn?"

Customer in our market, August 2014.

I grew my first crop of sweet corn in 1972; a variety called "Golden Bantam", that had been around since 1903.

Discovered by a farmer in Massachusetts, it was the first yellow sweet corn variety that bridged the gap between feed corn for animals and something that would be enjoyed by people.

Golden Bantam was (and is; it's still available from some seed suppliers) an open pollinated variety, meaning that it reproduces true from seed year after year.

Although many of our older customers suggest that Golden Bantam was the best sweet corn ever, I would suggest that their misty water-colored memories are flawed. The variety has neither the tenderness nor the sweetness of modern day sweet corn offerings. It displays a chewiness and flavour that was enjoyed by many back in the day, but again, doesn't compare favorably to present day hybrids.

So what is a hybrid ?

In its simplest form, a hybrid is developed by crossing two parents with individual desired qualities to create a new variety with both of the desired characteristics present.

When a female horse is crossed with a male donkey, a mule is created, combining the hardiness of a donkey with the size and strength of a horse.

Similarly, when when sweet corn breeders wanted increased tenderness and sweetness, they crossed two sweet corn parents with these qualities present. When a yellow variety and a white variety of sweet corn are crossed with each other, a bicolor variety may very well be the result (Peaches and Cream is but one of many bicolor varieties).

This is a gross over-simplification, and yet this is textbook classical plant or animal breeding. It has gone on for centuries; however the hybrid concept really came to the fore in the 1930's, especially in field corn breeding.

This is where the confusion creeps in for a lot of people, who figure that any new, improved variety has been genetically modified.

Genetic modification involves insertion or deletion of genes in a lab between organisms that could be conventionally bred in the field. The reason this is done is to create resistance to certain herbicides or insect pests. Field corn, soybeans and cotton are the most widely grown G.M. crops. They are often referred to as "Frankenfoods" for obvious reasons.

As most of you know, the practice is highly controversial. Europe has an outright ban on all G.M. crops. A large part of the problem, as myself and many other farmers see it, is that consumers were never made aware of the benefits of G.M. crops before they were introduced. Many highly toxic pesticides that were widely used by most farmers are no longer needed, due to the introduction of rootworm resistant field corn, for instance.

That said, rest assured that we grow absolutely no genetically modified vegetables on our farm.

There is a G.M. sweet corn that is resistant to corn earworms, but we don't grow it. There are also G.M. tomatoes and peppers; again, we don't grow them.

Any new variety of vegetable that we grow has been created the old-fashioned way: through classical plant breeding, because that is what you want and that is what we would prefer to grow.

Un-modified near Markham,

Guy