Hybrid seed

In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is produced by cross-pollinated plants. Hybrid seed production is predominant in modern agriculture and home gardening. It is one of the main contributors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century.[1] The alternatives to hybridization are open pollination and clonal propagation.[2]

All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will produce similar plants, while the seeds of the next generation from those hybrids will not consistently have the desired characteristics. Controlled hybrids provide very uniform characteristics because they are produced by crossing two inbred strains. Elite inbred strains are used that express well-documented and consistent phenotypes (such as high crop yield) that are relatively good for inbred plants.[2]

Hybrids are chosen to improve the characteristics of the resulting plants, such as better yield, greater uniformity, improved color, disease resistance. An important factor is the heterosis or combining ability of the parent plants. Crossing any particular pair of inbred strains may or may not result in superior offspring. The parent strains used are therefore carefully chosen so as to achieve the uniformity that comes from the uniformity of the parents, and the superior performance that comes from heterosis.

History

In the US, experimental agriculture stations in the 1920s investigated the hybrid crops, and by the 1930s farmers had widely adopted the first hybrid maize.[3]

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gollark: Just because you can describe a task in a sentence or so doesn't mean you can give a description clear and detailed enough to think about programming it.
gollark: Early attempts at AI back in the last millennium tried to create AIs by giving them logical reasoning abilities and a large set of facts. This didn't really work; they did some things, hit the limits of the facts they had, and didn't do anything very interesting.
gollark: They don't even have *memory* - you just train the model a bunch, keep that around, feed it data, and then get the results; next time you want data out, you use the original model from the training phase.
gollark: They don't really have goals, only the training code does, and that goal is something like "maximize prediction accuracy with respect to the data".

See also

References
  1. "Improving Corn; based on "Hybrid Corn", published in the Yearbook of Agriculture, 1962". United States Department of Agriculture. Retrieved 14 December 2014.
  2. David Tay (n.d.). "Vegetable Hybrid Seed Production". Seeds: Trade, Production and Technology (PDF). ?. pp. 128–139.
  3. Paul Conkin (2008). "5.4 Plant and Animal Breeding". A Revolution Down on the Farm. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 118–120.
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