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This 4th of July program, hosted by Todd Gleason, explores the history of agricultural adaptation and innovation in the United States, drawing a parallel to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence. The broadcast features three historical segments detailing the evolution of primary row crops and soil management practices. It traces the genetic development of corn from early flint and dent crosses to modern commercial hybrids, emphasizing the narrowing of its genetic base. It also highlights the pioneering no-till farming experiments at University of Illinois Extension's Dixon Springs research farm, which revolutionized soil conservation by drastically reducing soil erosion in Southern Illinois. Finally, the program outlines the domestication of the soybean, its introduction to North America by sailors and agricultural explorers, and the critical importance of preserving its genetic diversity to protect future crops against pests and diseases.
00:00 July 4th | Independence, Agricultural Adaptation, and the Land
01:24 Declaration of Independence
05:59 A History of Corn with Forrest Troyer
16:03 No-Till Preserves Soils and Independence
19:40 A History of the Soybean with Ted Hymowitz
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00:00 July 4th | Independence, Agricultural Adaptation, and the Land
01:24 Declaration of Independence
05:59 A History of Corn with Forrest Troyer
16:03 No-Till Preserves Soils and Independence
19:40 A History of the Soybean with Ted Hymowitz
Creators and Guests
What is Closing Market Report?
Established 1985
The Closing Market Report airs weekdays at 2:06pm central on WILL AM580, Urbana. University of Illinois Extension Farm Broadcaster Todd Gleason hosts the program. Each day he asks commodity analysts about the trade in Chicago, delves deep into the global growing regions weather, and talks with ag economists, entomologists, agronomists, and others involved in agriculture at the farm and industry level.
website: willag.org
twitter: @commodityweek
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This 4th of July program, hosted by Todd Gleason, explores the history of agricultural adaptation and innovation in the United States, drawing a parallel to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence. The broadcast features three historical segments detailing the evolution of primary row crops and soil management practices. It traces the genetic development of corn from early flint and dent crosses to modern commercial hybrids, emphasizing the narrowing of its genetic base. It also highlights the pioneering no-till farming experiments at University of Illinois Extension's Dixon Springs research farm, which revolutionized soil conservation by drastically reducing soil erosion in Southern Illinois. Finally, the program outlines the domestication of the soybean, its introduction to North America by sailors and agricultural explorers, and the critical importance of preserving its genetic diversity to protect future crops against pests and diseases.
00:00 July 4th | Independence, Agricultural Adaptation, and the Land
01:24 Declaration of Independence
05:59 A History of Corn with Forrest Troyer
16:03 No-Till Preserves Soils and Independence
19:40 A History of the Soybean with Ted Hymowitz
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00:00 July 4th | Independence, Agricultural Adaptation, and the Land
Todd Gleason: From University of Illinois Extension, I’m Todd Gleason. It’s the 4th of July holiday. Today we’ll focus on uniquely American stories of independence, agricultural adaptation, and the land. We begin where the nation started. We’ll look back at Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence, summarizing the self-evident truths that justified the American colonies breaking ties with Great Britain.
That same spirit of forging a new path is deeply rooted in our agricultural history. We’ll explore the story of corn, detailing how farmers adapted crosses of flint and dent corn across the expanding Midwest to lay the groundwork for modern hybrids. Then we’ll hear how the soybean came to America, starting with the sailor who first brought the beans to Savannah, Georgia in the 1760s, the agricultural pioneers who later expanded the crop’s genetic diversity. Along the way, we’ll travel to the noddy landscape of Southern Illinois, where Dixon Springs research farm has spent decades protecting the region’s soils, including the early development of no-till farming methods that are still used across the country today. It is a 4th of July look at the history, the crops, and the soil that built the nation.
01:24 Declaration of Independence
Todd Gleason: Our forefathers declared sovereignty when 56 men of the American colonies signed the Declaration of Independence. It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11th and June 28th of 1776. What Jefferson did was to summarize self-evident truths and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and Great Britain. What follows is an excerpt of the beginning and ending of the United States Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote:
Todd Gleason: In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Todd Gleason: Excerpts from the Declaration of Independence. If you’d like to read an entire transcription of the document, visit the National Archives online.
05:59 A History of Corn with Forrest Troyer
Todd Gleason: It’s the 4th of July weekend. Now let’s get into the way-back machine. We’ll hear three stories from the early 2000s. All three detail agricultural history in the United States. Two of them explore our primary row crops. Explore, by the way, is a good word for how corn and soybeans came to America. The other looks back at how University of Illinois researchers in the southern part of the state, concerned with soil erosion, worked to change how those two crops were managed in the field. We’ll start with the history of corn, how it came to the US, and the primary role Illinois has played in its development.
Corn was first domesticated in Mexico between 4,500 and 7,000 years ago along the 18th parallel. It was flint corn. Somewhere around 1000 BC, retired corn breeder Forrest Troyer says this early corn was moved into the area we now know as New Mexico and Arizona.
Forrest Troyer: And then the dent corn came in after Columbus. Probably Cortez, when he went to Tampa Bay, probably brought the first dent corn to the United States.
Todd Gleason: The critical thing about these two moves was that the corn, flint and dent, had to be adapted to longer days and cooler, shorter seasons. Dent corn has also been developed in Mexico, but much later than flint, probably about 1500 BC, says Troyer. So flint corn came into the southwestern part of the United States, and dent corn traveled much later into the eastern US. Dent corn was superior to flint in almost every respect. The kernels were larger, and the yields were greater. Soon enough, European settlers in the New World recognized the two different kinds of corn were related and could be crossed.
Forrest Troyer: The flints were the source of earlier maturity that was needed, and the dents were the source of higher yield and also better feeding traits. Some number of people in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky crossed flint by dent to develop varieties.
Todd Gleason: Generally, says Troyer, it is estimated that by the time most of the United States had been settled in the 1840s, about 250 different varieties of dent/flint crosses had been developed. The corn belt at that time still hadn’t made its way northward. The prime growing states were Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Forrest Troyer: The reason for that is that the Land Grants from the Revolutionary War from the state of Virginia, and also the Land Grants that were issued to veterans of the Mexican War, were virtually all in that area. There was a small area in southern Ohio on the Scioto River, but most of there were two areas in Tennessee and two areas in Kentucky. The corn in Virginia was already there. They had already worked with it before the movement West started.
Todd Gleason: It is the combination of what American Indians did in bringing flint corn north into the US, and what European settlers did with dent corn on the East Coast, that has resulted in the hybrids grown today by farmers in the new corn belt: Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. As farmers settled those states, they brought the 250 dent/flint crosses northwestward with them. Forty years later, in the 1880s, these producers had adapted the 250 varieties to the local conditions in the states across the Midwest. It resulted in a thousand locally adapted, open-pollinated varieties of corn. In 1888, Iowa for the first time ever raised more corn than any other state in the union. The extra 750 varieties of open-pollinated corn, says retired corn breeder Forrest Troyer, were more drought-tolerant and shorter-seasoned than the original 250.
Forrest Troyer: Out of those thousand varieties, there were probably 20 or 30 varieties that were grown much more than the others. One thing that contributed to that was the corn shows.
Todd Gleason: One of the most popular varieties was called Leaming. It was developed about 40 or 50 miles northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio in Wilmington, and had won a corn show in Paris, France. It was the first widely adapted variety of yellow corn. Half of all the yellow corn grown in the US was at one time Leaming corn. It actually represented just one quarter of the total US corn crop because 50% of the corn grown in the mid–1800s was white dent corn, not yellow dent corn.
The next big variety was to become the foundation of almost all of today’s hybrid corn. It was called Reid’s Yellow Dent. Troyer says Robert Reid developed the variety by accident when he moved from Russellville, Ohio to Delavan, Illinois. In that first year, he planted and saved back seed from a variety called Gordon Hopkins corn. It had been planted late in the season. The following spring, he planted the Gordon Hopkins corn again.
Forrest Troyer: He didn’t run a germination test, and he got a field of corn where the stand was too good to tear up, but it wasn’t as good as it should be. So he went in and hand-planted a common early yellow flint that was grown in the area. Because the early corn was planted later, they crossed. Over a period of at least 40 years, Robert Reid and later James Reid selected Reid’s Yellow Dent.
Todd Gleason: It became very popular after winning the corn show at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. Troyer says because of the win, farmers often called Reid’s Yellow Dent “World’s Fair Corn.” A Perry Holden headed the agronomy department at the University of Illinois, evangelized Reid’s Yellow Dent, and convinced the Funk brothers of Bloomington, Illinois to start producing and selling it. Holden later took a position at Iowa State University and took 600 bushels of Reid’s Yellow Dent with him. Troyer says some Iowa seedsmen were not very happy about the introduction of an Illinois corn in their state.
Forrest Troyer: It soon replaced a lot of the varieties that were formerly in Iowa.
Todd Gleason: Reid’s Yellow Dent and livestock feeding trial studies from the University of Wisconsin and Purdue are the major reasons US corn farmers abandoned white corn. The university studies proved pigs grew faster when they ate yellow corn. It was because yellow corn provided a good source of vitamin A, and white corn did not. Reid’s Yellow Dent was the most popular open-pollinated corn variety in states like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. The farther north you went, the less tolerant it was of the shorter, drier growing season. But the University of Minnesota went to work on the problem and solved it with a yellow dent corn called Minnesota 13.
These two varieties, says Forrest Troyer, set the stage for the development of hybrid corn. By 1920, the double cross hybrid method had been developed by Donald Jones. Still, it remained difficult to find four inbreds good enough to make a double cross to sell. Henry Wallace, who founded the Pioneer Seed Company in Iowa, sold the first double cross hybrid in 1924. It was called Copper Cross. It wasn’t until 10 years later in 1934 that hybrid corn varieties even made a dent in US corn production. Forrest Troyer says that year, three-tenths of one percent of all corn sold for seed in the US was a hybrid.
Forrest Troyer: Iowa was the fastest growing, partly because of the work that the editorials Henry Wallace wrote for Wallace’s Farmer. By World War II, by 1941 and 1942, I believe 90% of the corn in Iowa was hybrid. The rest of the corn belt wasn’t far behind, just a few more years. It was an amazing thing. Once it got going, it was quickly accepted.
Todd Gleason: In 1934, that three-tenths of a percent of hybrid seed sold in the US came primarily from two companies, Pioneer and the Funk Brothers Seed Company of Bloomington, Illinois. In 1935, Troyer says the first ag experiment station hybrid was introduced: US 13. A year later, Iowa 939 was released. In those early years of hybridization of corn, it was thought farmers would buy the original material and then produce their own hybrids. That’s how open-pollinated crosses had been adapted throughout the Midwest. But the model didn’t work for hybrid corn. So the corn seed companies prospered. Pioneer and Funk, along with DeKalb, were the three largest. These three companies and the experiment stations used the available open-cross yellow dent corn to develop their hybrids. It was at this point that the majority of the genetic diversification of the domesticated corn plant was lost.
Today’s hybrid corn comes from about eight genetically different open-pollinated yellow dent corn lines. They include Leaming, Lancaster, Reid’s Yellow Dent, Minnesota 13, Northwestern Dent, Funk’s Yellow Dent, and Troyer’s Reid, along with 176A.
Forrest Troyer: Over time, the thing that happened is that those inbreds that came from those popular varieties became the backbone of the hybrid seed corn industry. What it really amounted to is more emphasis was put on wide adaptation of the hybrids. The inbreds from the varieties that did well over a more widely adapted area came to the forefront, and they’re the backbone of the hybrid seed corn industry today.
Todd Gleason: Forrest Troyer traced half of the seed corn sold today to Reid’s Yellow Dent, and another 20% directly to Leaming, Lancaster, Minnesota 13, and Northwestern Dent. It’s a narrow genetic base from which to work, and before his death in May 2015, he said this confines the ability of corn breeders to continue improving yellow dent. During his professional career, Forrest Troyer developed and co-developed 40 commercial hybrids that sold more than 60 million bags of seed in North America. This is enough corn to plant all North American production for two years. His most well-known corn hybrids from 1974 to 1983 were Pioneer hybrids 3732 and 3780.
16:03 No-Till Preserves Soils and Independence
Todd Gleason: It was here in deep Southern Illinois, close to the Shawnee National Forest and the furthest north cypress swamp in the United States, that the modern era of farming was challenged and changed. The land rolls, and when it rains, washes away into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by the ton. Or at least they did until a University of Illinois agronomist decided there had to be a better way to grow crops on the hillsides. For 37 years, George McKibben experimented and evangelized what was to become the modern era of no-till farming. Illinois agronomist Steve Ebelhar explains the effects of the research can be seen throughout the southern Illinois landscape.
Steve Ebelhar: Absolutely, because back in the 30s and 40s when the area was still under conventional tillage systems, we saw a lot of really gully erosion, a lot of water coming off the fields just saturated with soil, moving off the profile, off the landscapes. Now when you see a rain, it’s mostly clearer water, not a lot of soil movement, because the residues are helping hold the soil in place. So we don’t see the gullies that we once saw under conventional till systems where the water has moved tremendous amounts of soil off the profiles.
Todd Gleason: What really made George McKibben’s no-till experiments at Dixon Springs work as a soil-saving tool was pretty simple. And there’s a reason it took so long for farmers to adopt the practice, meaning reasons it wasn’t thought of or worked on prior to the 1960s. The technology to control weeds hadn’t been developed and adapted to the farm before that time. The herbicides allowed McKibben’s no-till experiments to work, says Ebelhar.
Steve Ebelhar: It’s really the merger of good weed control herbicides coming into the market and the pioneering effort of George McKibben that really made no-till take off in the early 60s into the 70s.
Todd Gleason: And then in the mid–1990s, when the herbicide-resistant varieties of soybeans were introduced, no-till really began to boom. The crop had been modified to withstand being sprayed with a herbicide, and no-till acres around the nation and in Illinois jumped. The first time no-till soybean acres outnumbered any other tillage method in the state of Illinois came in 2007, 41 years after George McKibben planted his first no-till experiment at Dixon Springs.
19:40 A History of the Soybean with Ted Hymowitz
Todd Gleason: Let’s continue on now. We have another crop to explore. Following the historical advancements in corn genetics and prior really to the implementation of no-till farming systems, agricultural progression shifted focus toward the cultivation and genetic expansion of the soybean. The historical trajectory of the soybean reveals a timeline spanning thousands of years from its wild origins in Southeast Asia to its widespread commercial cultivation right here in the United States.
The first written record of the soybean dates to the 11th century BC. The plant originated in the wilds of modern-day Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. From these points, it spread first to China in the north, says University of Illinois plant geneticist Ted Hymowitz. There Chinese farmers adapted Glycine soja, or the wild annual soybean, for cultivation.
Ted Hymowitz: So the farmers of China took this small black wild annual and domesticated it. When I say domesticate, what I’m referring to is just two traits they selected for. Those traits were simply upright plants, the wild soja is prostrate, recumbent, tends to trail, climb. The second was once it was prostrate, straight up, erect, we could then select for large seed size.
Todd Gleason: Those two traits mark the only real difference between the first domesticated soybean and its wild ancestor. And it happened about 3,000 years ago. It wasn’t until the 20th century that the next real evolution of the soybean occurred. With the mechanization of agriculture, farmers and soybean breeders quickly realized another third trait had to be added to the soybean. It shattered at maturity. This was bad. Farmers needed to be able to harvest soybeans without having them pop out of the pod before they could be put into a machine.
Ted Hymowitz: So that’s the third trait occurred and that was due to the thrashing mechanization that the farmers did not want in the United States to bring the soybeans to the thrashing floor. It was just a mess. So selection occurred for soybeans that did not shatter. In a line called CNS, Clemson Non-Shattering, that trait of not shattering was incorporated into all soybeans, commercial soybeans now grown in the United States and elsewhere.
Todd Gleason: So the domestication of the soybean started about 3,000 years ago. The first written record comes from the 11th century before Christ. The bean is derived from a wild annual called Glycine soja that looks a bit like a morning glory. It’s a viney plant that climbs and trails and produces small black seeds. It can still be found today. This plant was domesticated by Chinese farmers who made it stand upright and increased the seed size. Then US farmers added a third trait. They bred the soybean so that it would not shatter at harvest. Ted Hymowitz told me this story began prior to the Revolutionary War where a single individual sailed the Seven Seas and brought the soybean to North America from China.
In 1758, Samuel Bowen signed on as a sailor with a ship called the Pitt. He was an Englishman. The ship sailed to India, and then on to Hong Kong. From there, says plant geneticist Ted Hymowitz, Samuel Bowen signed off the Pitt and onto a ship called the Success. The Success sailed north from Hong Kong to Tientsin, China.
Ted Hymowitz: There the ship was captured because the British were not supposed to be trading other than in Hong Kong. The emperor was annoyed. The ship was never seen again, probably sunk. Mr. Bowen and those people on the ship were held hostage. Mr. Bowen writes for three years he was held a hostage, and eventually imprisoned in Hong Kong, actually Macau next door.
Todd Gleason: Samuel Bowen was eventually released and made his way back to the colonies, in this case, Savannah, Georgia. He brought with him a bag of beans, soybeans. It was the mid–1760s. Mr. Bowen was something of an entrepreneur. In 1767, Bowen was issued a royal patent for soy sauce. He had acquired some property in Georgia and was growing and pressing soybeans into sauce on a farm he called Greenwich. The sauce was grown for export to England.
Ted Hymowitz: It was quite a business. He was an entrepreneur because he also had the idea of crushing peanuts for oil, and in fact, we have records that he did it. So he was an entrepreneur, unfortunately he died 10 years later in 1777.
Todd Gleason: Despite his death, Bowen had managed to leave a legacy, the soybean. The first recorded evidence of the soybean in the United States belongs to him. The minutes from a 1765 meeting of a Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture acknowledges the receipt of six bottles of soy and seeds of Chinese vetch from Samuel Bowen. That is one story of how the soybean arrived in North America. There are others and Ted Hymowitz harbors one of them, but they cannot be proven. So it’s a ship called the Success, Chinese imprisonment, and Samuel Bowen that are credited with the introduction of the soybean to North American farmers. Now let’s follow the soybean in the last century.
On February 18, 1929, Howard Dorsett of Carlinville, Illinois, and Bill Morse, a native of Lowville, New York, set out from the States for East Asia. The United States Department of Agriculture dispatched the two and their families on a mission to collect accessions, different types of the soybean. In the late 1920s, it was apparent that the soybean was about to become a very important crop in the United States. USDA wanted as many different versions of this Asian native as possible. Dorsett and Morse were both plant scientists. By April of 1929, they and their families had settled in Tokyo. Over the next two years, the men, primarily Morse because Dorsett fell ill with double pneumonia, collected exactly 4,451 different accessions of the soybean.
These were soybeans, says University of Illinois plant geneticist Ted Hymowitz, grown throughout East Asia by native farmers. All but about 800 of the original accessions have been lost. In the 1930s, there was no germplasm repository. Hymowitz says the seeds were probed, and if found useless, thrown away.
Ted Hymowitz: So they collected the seed and their records, I went through all their records, journal after journal. It looked like nothing major was going to happen to the material, what was remaining that is, some 850 accessions, something like that. However, in the 1950s, things began to change.
Todd Gleason: What happened with the collection in the 50s, says Hymowitz, was unexpected yet expected. He says when you collect a diverse set of materials, in this case, lots of different types of soybeans, you do not know the value of the collection until something in it becomes useful. In the 1950s, one of the accessions collected by Dorsett and Morse, a soybean called Peking 88788, was found to be resistant to the soybean cyst nematode. The cyst nematode was and remains a major pest problem for US farmers. The resistance found in 88788 is now incorporated, says Hymowitz, into about 95% of the soybean hybrids grown in the United States.
Ted Hymowitz: So, here is one line, 88788, that paid for all plant introduction experiments, exploration since the beginning of the US Department of Agriculture.
Todd Gleason: Hymowitz believes the material collected by Dorsett and Morse will become more valuable over time because it was collected before modern soybean varieties were developed. We don’t know, he says, what pathogens, diseases may inflict the bean in the future. So it’s important to maintain the diversity of the remaining Dorsett and Morse accessions. Those accessions are housed here on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois in the USDA Soybean Germplasm Collection.
That wraps up our celebration of the nation, and some of the foundational developments in North American crop production on this July 4 holiday. From Forrest Troyer’s tracking of the narrow genetic base of modern corn hybrids through Reid’s Yellow Dent, to the soil-saving and moisture management revolutions brought on by no-till farming systems, and finally the millennial-long domestication of the soybean. The through-line of this agricultural history is the critical intersection of genetic preservation and continuous agronomic adaptation. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason.