FREE: Golden Cross Bantam Hybrid Sweet Corn

The listing, Golden Cross Bantam Hybrid Sweet Corn has ended.

The first great economic contribution of hybrid sweet corn occurred in the early 1930s when the first widely-grown single-cross corn hybrid, Golden Cross Bantam, was released, in part, to control Stewart’s wilt. In 1923, Glenn Smith, a USDA scientist working in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University (Fig. 13), began inbreeding lines from a popular, open-pollinated sweet corn cultivar, Golden Bantam. Like many early-maturing sweet corn cultivars derived from Northern Flint corn, Golden Bantam was extremely susceptible to Stewart’s wilt (Fig. 14). In 1930, Smith tested his first set of Golden Bantam hybrid crosses in the midst of one of the most destructive epidemics of Stewart’s wilt ever experienced in northern Indiana. Two of Smith’s inbred lines (P39 and P51) that were derived from two different versions of Golden Bantam combined to produce a single-cross hybrid that was resistant to Stewart’s wilt (Fig. 15). Following a second year of successful performance during another Stewart’s wilt epidemic in 1931, the hybrid was named Golden Cross Bantam. Within a few years after it was released in 1932, Golden Cross Bantam had virtually revolutionized the sweet corn canning industry, and 70 to 80% of all sweet corn canned in the US was Glenn Smith’s Stewart’s wilt-resistant hybrid.