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Genetic Freaks. Corn is a hybridizer's delight because its male part (the tassel) and its female part (the immature ear) are separate on the plant and can easily be hand pollinated. Most other crops have their male and female parts close together. The long-sought key to separation of the sexes in order to hybridize other commercial crops came accidentally with the discovery of patches of sorghum that had hereditary male sterility. From this seedsmen developed a hybrid. This year the U.S. is planting 8,000,000 acres to hybrid sorghum for feed—half the entire sorghum crop—although the hybrid is only five years old. This started hybridizers hunting for other genetic freaks with hereditary male sterility. Researcher Frank Eaton of die U.S. Agriculture Department, working at Texas A. & M., found a chemical key that may unlock all the closed doors. Eaton noted that a weed killer, lightly applied, sterilized the male stamens of cotton, left the more protected female pistil apparently unhurt. If this means what hybridizers hope it means, it may be the key to hybridizing all crops—and vastly increasing their yield.
The Machine Mother. What is happening in corn and other crops can be matched in animals and fowl. One of the pioneer researchers was Dr. E. Parmalee Prentice, a son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller. In the 19205, at his farm in Massachusetts, many strains were combined to produce the superior White Leghorn, now the basic egg-laying hen in the U.S. Today some 30 hatcheries specialize in producing laying pullets, have helped to push U.S. yearly egg production per hen up from 134 in 1940 to 200 in 1958.
The demand for the more prolific egg layer has required more and more automation. Near Atlanta, Ga., Layer Breeder Roy Durr produced 500,000 chickens last year trying to keep up with orders for layers. He puts the eggs in special incubators that vastly improve on the maternal solicitude of real hens. A hen often forgets to turn her eggs (causing the membrane lining to adhere to the shell and killing the fetus), or in hot dry weather leaves the nest and lets them dry out. Durr's mechanical mother turns each egg every hour, and when a thermometer warns that the relative humidity is too low. shoots in a fine spray of water. Durr staggers the eggs, in each incubator, because from the 16th day until the 21st, when the chick breaks through the shell, a hatching chicken gives off heat, thereby thriftily helps incubate the eggs put in later. This way Durr has to turn on the electricity only about 75% of the time.
The laying pullets are sold to other farmers who do nothing but produce eggs for the table in a completely automatic fashion. The hens are kept in individual cages. They stick their heads out to feed from a continuously filled feed trough, turn around to a drinking fountain, drop their eggs on the inclined wire floor. The eggs roll outside through an automatic counter onto a conveyor belt that takes them to a human sorter who puts them in boxes. Another conveyor belt takes away the droppings. One man can easily take care of 7,000 birds with an output of 4,000 eggs a day. Outside each cage is the laying record. When this drops, the hen goes to the stewing pot.