ISU Media Message Episode #1

I hope it doesn't stay that way hello and welcome to ISU media message I'm Bob Linda Meyer the associate director of the media resources Center here at Iowa State and it's my pleasure to be the host of this new series we hope it's going to be a continuing series the mission of the program is to give our viewers an opportunity to see a number of the films and videotapes that have been produced here at Iowa State most of them not having an opportunity to be seen by a wider audience they're produced for the support of classroom instruction they're produced for public relations purposes of the University they're produced for others around the state of Iowa but seldom have we had an opportunity to share them with the larger audience the television audience and so that's why we're here tonight in this our opening program in the series it's my pleasure to welcome Eddie Rick who's senior writer director on the staff at the Media Resources Center and ed you're bringing us two films tonight right one is called the miracle of corn which is about a seven and a half minute film on corn and the other is called the hybrid corn miracle both of them have miracles in them so okay both of them our little corny and a little bit about miracle song right right now the both of these productions were produced for the living history farm in Des Moines and who was the moving force behind them really well the the actual founder of the living history farm the late Bill Murray who used to be professor emeritus here at Iowa State and he came to us one day in 1988 and said I want to do a film on a corn plant growing and so that's what the result is okay and that one the cine Golden Eagle among a number of other prizes right right right let's have a look at your cine Golden Eagle just so people appreciate how magnificent that trophy really is cine stands for what it cine stands for the Council on international non theatrical events which allows it to be shown in international Film Festival's representing the United States overseas and so it's a great award to have great well congratulations and without further ado let's have a chance to look at its award-winning film again it's called the miracle of corn over the course of a growing season one kernel of corn will grow into a plant that may produce more than 600 kernels if you were to plant one acre of corn you might seed about 22,000 plants if each plant grew one ear and each year had 600 kernels that one acre would have over 13 million kernels if you had planted 400 acres you'd probably harvest more than 5 billion kernels of corn let's take a closer look at just how this corn producing factory works by following what happens to a single kernel the seed using the food stored inside the kernel the embryo starts to grow in warm moist soil a primary route shoots down to gather nutrients for continued growth meanwhile the germinating kernel sends up toward the surface several rolled-up leaves within a shield that protects them about a week after planting the new chute emerges the leaves break through the shield into the light with the leaves out and the roots in place the corn plant begins making its own food the stored food in the seed having been used up food is made in the leaves by photosynthesis photosynthesis uses light energy from the Sun to produce chemical energy stored in the form of sugars as the leaves grow out so do the roots which take in minerals and water to change the sugars in the leaves into proteins and other foods as a result the young corn plant grows rapidly on its own the leaves tightly wrapped around each other near their base help support the plant as it grows the tassel emerges revealing thousands of small pouches holding the pollen needed for reproduction meanwhile lower down on the stalk the ear has been developing delicate silk like strands emerge from the end of the ear each silk has grown from a potential Colonel sitting on the cob surrounded by the leafy husks there are 600 or more potential kernels so there are 600 or more silks with both silks and tassel displayed pollination begins it's been estimated that as many as 5 million grains of pollen are produced by a single tassel that's over 5,000 grains of pollen available for every silk that is to be pollinated when a pollen grain lands on a silk it sends out a tiny tube through the silk that reaches back to the potential kernel the female part of the plant male cells produced by the pollen move down the tube to join with the female cells this is called fertilization it happens over 600 times on the ear once for each potential kernel when fertilization is complete each of the new kernels has the embryo of a whole new corn plant developing inside the plant is at its maximum height it will grow no taller food production by the leaves now goes toward the developing kernels maturity the kernels have stored up as much food as they can hold for months after the seed was planted the mature ear with its more than 600 full new kernels is ready for harvest harvest for feed food and other products for human use well you've just seen the miracle of corn and my guest tonight is Edie Eric the filmmaker who made that lovely film and I understand it has won a number of international awards tell us about those it right you've got more a bunch of stuff here to show you this is the that canvas is the won a silver award at Zaragoza Spain Film Festival and that was that was the first award than at one and I will show you another one one actually three Awards the second one was a first-place award in Nitra Czechoslovakia which was very nice Nitra is now part of separated Czechoslovakia I think it's the part called Slovakia as a matter of fact right yeah and the third one is the Berlin Green Week Film Festival which was it got this award last January the silver medal on that one right well it is a beautiful film and I think the audience would be interested in knowing a little bit about how you got some of those things to move like the part where that before the plant grows up and up right in the middle of the frame right the vegetative growth was really kind of difficult to get because it's time-lapse of course and we had to figure out how long it would take for that plant to grow in that space of footage and most of the experts didn't know how long it would take for that corn plant to grow that far and they would just say well it doesn't take too long but I needed a little bit more specific than that so you take a frame and then it waits and real flights are turned back on right we had we had to film it in a darkened room because plants grow at night as well as during the day so we couldn't use sunlight so we had to go into a greenhouse in a darkened room and use a plant that was in a in its own soil and which was sterilized because we couldn't have any bugs or mites or anything flying around there because they would just pop on and pop off once every ten minutes or once every 20 minutes whenever we would click the shutter well you must have had corn plants at all different stages of growth right we used about 20 or 30 different plants over the course of a seven-month period and even though a corn plant only takes four months to to grow to its tallest it took us seven months but Mother Nature has several thousand years experience more than we do I was also impressed with the little sequence where the narrator incidentally Doug Brown from wi radio guy who reads the book club so wonderfully where he says the tassel emerges and that all those little grains of pollen start to fall now that's not time-lapse there isn't no what we did was we had to do high-speed now that's just the opposite of time-lapse we had to shoot about 400 frames per second and to slow down the gravity pull of these little pollen grains hitting the the silk and that was that was a little bit of a problem also trying to catch all those little bitty grains of pollen because we had to get very close now I noticed frequently throughout the film you go back to this sort of high view of a great lawn must be a mile long cornfield that was what but part of the ISU research farm right exactly and we had a camera situated out on the end of that field for the full length of the growing season to take just one shot about every three weeks and then we dissolved from one once one scene to the next to give that impression of a full four years worth of growth in 30 seconds in the last the over the credits okay now the other film that you're gonna show us tonight the the hybrid corn miracle was also produced for the Living History Farms right right and what's the story there well the story there is that we're trying to show how hybrids are produced and we used animation we used in the field demonstrations to explain for example why yeah I know a lot of people have seen or I've gone out detasseling and yeah we're wondering why am i always detasseling these things and this videotape will show them exactly why they're doing that alright good let's look at it then this is another award-winning film done by Edie Eric and it's called the hybrid corn miracle what is this car that we see raw after ro mile upon mile so even so straight so abundant it's hybrid corn the result of years of painstaking breeding and testing a revolutionary product of science applied to agriculture a hundred years ago farming was a lot different at the turn of the century average national yields of corn had not improved much from the previous century fluctuations were due mainly to climate yields remained much as they had been before averaging only 23 to 28 bushels per acre during the mid 30s average yields dropped because of drought but in the 40s yields increase to more than ever before the reason hybrid seed was introduced as we moved into the 50s and beyond average yields were bolstered by the use of fertilizers and pesticides improved machinery more plants per acre timeliness of operations and better farm management the major factor in these increases however was the continued development of better hybrid varieties today virtually all the seed corn that farmers plant is hybrid seed with average national yields of over 100 bushels per acre four times what it had been only 50 years before how did farmers accomplish this they changed their way of getting seed before hybrids farmers used open pollinated seed that is the silks of the ear on any plant could be pollinated from any of hundreds of different plants in the field each sister kernel on an ear may have had a different male parent when the farmer selected the best looking ear to save for planting next year he was actually saving a variety of genetically different kernels when he planted them the next spring hoping to produce a uniform crop of high-yield he got only a diverse non-uniform crop of average yield not much different from what he had in previous years hybrid seed however is not produced by the farmer it's scientifically developed by specialized seed corn companies which then sell their seed to farmers because of nearly identical heredity the hybrid plants have uniform resistance to pests and diseases for example they are adapted to the areas where they're grown and because of their uniformity they can be easily planted and harvested by machine so the higher price of the hybrid seed is offset by its dependably higher yields how then is a hybrid seed developed the process occurs in three steps the first is to produce genetically pure lines of seed by selective inbreeding an important characteristic of corn is that it has both male and female parts on the same plant the male part is the tassel which produces pollen the female part is made up of potential kernels on the ear shoot deep within the husk each potential kernel has an exposed silk attached to it to catch the pollen making reproduction possible inbreeding is the carefully controlled method of pollinating a plant with its own pollen the ear shoots are covered to prevent their silks from accidental pollination from neighboring plants each selected plant is carefully pollinated by hand this inbreeding and selecting process may be repeated for as many as six or seven generations until the plants heredity becomes uniform that is all plants of an inbred variety will look the same and will respond in a similar way to the environment hundreds of inbreds are produced and their resulting seeds are tested for the desired combination of traits what are some of these traits good seed must have traits adapted to the environmental conditions in which it is planted for example the soil type the amount and distribution of rainfall the length of the growing season and the prevalence of particular pests one such test is for resistance to the European corn borer an insect that's been a major threat to corn growers after they're infested the test inbreds are each evaluated to see which has done the best job of resisting these hungry insects by the time inbred testing is complete most will have failed to measure up and will have been discarded those inbreds showing the most desirable traits will go on to the second step of hybrid seed development experimental or test crossing the key to hybridizing is taking the pollen from one selected inbred and cross pollinating it with a second unrelated inbred the outcome is usually amazing the resulting hybrid seed produces a plant the following year that's bigger and stronger than either of its parents this is the miracle of hybrid vigor the purpose of this test Crossing is to find the cross of two inbreds that combines the desired traits and gives a higher yield than existing hybrids again the same carefully controlled methods of pollination are followed only this time the pollen from one inbred is crossed on to the silks of the other in bred thousands of inbreds are crossed the resulting hybrid seeds taken from the female plant are planted the following year for testing and evaluation this is time-consuming and expensive but it eventually comes up with a winning cross it's estimated that out of more than a thousand tests crosses only one will produce a hybrid seed that will perform significantly better than had existed before when the breeder has found a cross of two in breads that produces an acceptable high yielding hybrid seed the third step begins mass producing it in sufficient quantities for sale to farmers seed corn companies contract with skilled farmers to do this on a large scale with the assistance of the company the two selected inbreds are planted in the same field in alternating sets of rows for example one male row of 1n bread may be planted next to as many as four female rows of the other end bread and it is these female plants that will eventually produce the needed quantities of hybrid seed on these female seed rows the tassels are removed to prevent any accidental inbreeding detasseling machines often remove the majority of the tassels however it will take repeated trips through the field to remove all the tassels by hand because not all tassels emerge on the same day hand detasseling provides brief summer employment to many thousands of youngsters and migrant workers each year pollination occurs when the wind blows pollen from the male rose to the silks of the detasseled female rose the resulting hybrid seed is harvested from the female rose this is the seed that will be sold and distributed to farmers for planting next year but if looks could sell corn as it did a hundred years ago this corn would not be saleable yet these seeds have in them the tested hybrid vigor that will produce an abundant crop for the farmers who plant them before distribution the seed is taken to a conditioning plant where it's sorted dried sized and bagged for sale to farmers all over the world the farming of corn in the early 1900's was vastly improved by the introduction of hybridization today yields are at least four times that of the 1920s allowing farmers to export more corn to world markets enough to make a significant impact in helping feed the world this is the miracle of hybrid car welcome back to ISU media message you've just seen the hybrid corn miracle and my guest is a dirac man who made that film now these techniques of inbreeding the corn and then crossing the corn that's really the fundamental of the way these hybrids have been perfected isn't right and and I'm not a corn breeder or anything like that so I'm just a filmmaker but it took us a while to to boil everything down that we were told into three basic concepts which could be easily told both of these programs we've seen today are playing at the living history farm during the season when it's open so if you'd like to see them again that's a that's a good opportunity to go and find them they're in fact called the miracle of corn Museum at the living history farm that's our program for tonight I'd like to thank edrick for being here and I hope you'll join us here again next week for ISU media message you