Bruce ratt, 11, of Wilmington, Del., for his question:
WHERE WAS CORN FIRST GROWN?
Botanists say that corn first grew somewhere in North America.
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 not much larger than 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 from Canada all the way to the southern tip of South America. The Indians grew 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 wheat to as big as a quarter.
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.
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 studying heredity in corn.
It wasn't until 1933 that Hybrid corn came into common us. 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 about 87 bushels per acre in the early 1970s.
The total production of corn increased from about 2.3 billion bushels of corn a year in the early 1930s to more than 5.5 billion bushels a year in the early 1970s.
Improved machinery enables farmers to 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 which destroy many insect pests that attack the plants.
Farmers usually plant field corn in the early spring, about 10 days after the average date of the final killing frost.