Planting Time

Like hundreds of Midwest towns, tiny (pop. 1,600) El Paso, Ill., which calls itself "capital city of the corn belt," was an all but deserted village last week. Few cars disturbed the quiet of its sunny streets; in the town's three taverns, business was slow. El Paso's calm was part of the rhythm of the U.S. heartland; it was planting time. Outside the town, Woodford County's farmers worked 14 hours a day to get their seed kernels into the ground.

A grey Ford whipped along the back-country gravel roads, stirring up a trail of dust. Braking to a stop alongside a flat field, the car's slight and sunburned driver sighted down mile-long rows of tiny green shoots, planted the week before. "Ain't that beautiful?" grinned Lester Pfister. He raced on to another field, wiggled his wiry 126 lbs. through a barbed-wire fence, and squatted on the ground where one of his tractors had just passed. "Everything's good," he said, feeling the soil. "You can tell it's time for planting when you can sit on the ground before 10 a.m. and not get your butt cold or wet."

Miracle of the Seed. Farmer Pfister (rhymes with Easter) is the biggest U.S. individual grower of hybrid seed corn. This year his six-year-old Pfister Hybrid Corn Co. will gross about $1,500,000, net some $60,000 to $70,000, which Lester

Pfister will plow back into equipment. By this weekend, he will have helped plant 4,800 acres with his special inbred strains.

At the same time, 26,000 corn belt farmers from eastern Ohio to middle Nebraska are planting his seed corn--and by late .summer the tassels of Pfister strains will have over 5,000,000 acres. The hardy hybrid corns, grown by Pfister and others,* have wrought a U.S. agricultural revolution. Last year they pushed the national average yield of corn, once only 25 bu. per acre, to a record 42.7 bu. In Pfister's own county, the yield was 66 bu. per acre.

For restless Lester Pfister, the revolution was a long time coming. A farm boy who quit school in the eighth grade to work in the cornfields at $30 a month, he has been inbreeding and crossbreeding corn since 1925. Neighbors, watching him tie paper bags over corn tassels and ear shoots to control fertilization, called him "Crazy Lester." To keep up his experiments he mortgaged everything he owned. When depression hit, he stalled off bankruptcy only by ducking meetings of his creditors. One day he went to an El Paso bank to plead for a last-ditch loan. Unwrapping a newspaper, he produced a ten-inch ear of corn, the best that any other Woodford County farmer had grown. Then he held up a handsome 14-inch ear of Pfister corn grown from hybrid seed. He got the loan.

The Harvest. Today, at 51, Pfister is the president and major stockholder of a bank which once refused him a loan. He employs 107 full-time workers, and in the weeks of "detasseling" (just before the strains are pollinated) recruits 1.500 helpers from nearby high schools. His payroll is $400,000 a year, the value of his land and equipment $1,800,000. He is a smart businessman and works hard at it, but looks tired and bored in his office. His eyes light up only when he gets out in a field.

"I'll be happy," he says, "if I can contribute just a little that will take some more of the gamble out of farming. Subsidies and price supports will never do that. The only thing they contribute is progress toward socialized farming--and that's the worst thing that could happen to this country."

*The five biggest U.S. producers of hybrid seed corn: De Kalb (Ill.) Agricultural Association Inc.; Pfister Associated Growers Inc. (which Pfister started and later left); Henry Wallace's Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co. of Grimes, Iowa; Edward J. Funk & Sons of Kentland, Ind.; Pfister Hybrid Corn Co.

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