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5 Heterosis and the social division oflabor We hear a great deal these days about atomic energy. Yet I am convinced that historians will rank the harnessing of hybrid power as equally significant. Henry A. Wallace The development of hybrid corn has long been regarded as the supreme achievement of public agricultural science. Given Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's 1958 visit to hybrid seed-corn producer Roswell Garst's Iowa farm, and his plans for a Soviet Corn Belt based on American genetic technology, we may forgive Henry Wallace the hyperbole evident in the passage quoted. Without doubt the statistics commonly associated with the introduction of hybrid corn and the phenomenon of heterosis - or hybrid vigor - are impressive. Corn yields, which had actually been declining in the United States, began to climb sharply after hybrid seed became commercially available in the mid-1930s. The shift from open-pollinated to hybrid varieties was completed by Corn Belt farmers in a single decade, and by 1965 over 95 percent of U.S. corn acreage was planted with the new seed. The remarkable rapidity with which the innovation spread and the classic S shape and dramatic slope of the adoption curve for hybrid corn attracted the attention of sociologists. With the deployment of hybrid corn was born a genre of sociological inquiry known as diffusion-adoption research (Ryan and Gross 1943; Ryan 1948; Rogers 1962; Fliegel and Van Es 1983). The effect ofhybrid corn on physical output was no less dramatic. Despite a reduction of 30 million acres on which grain corn was harvested between 1930 and 1965, the volume of production increased by over 2.3 billion bushels. In the early 1950s, economist Zvi Griliches set out to assess empirically the magnitude of the social benefits accruing to hybrid corn. He compared the value of the increased corn output attributable to hybrids with the public and private research expenditures used in developing the new varieties and concluded that "At least 700 percent per year was being earned, as of 1955, on the average dollar invested in hybrid corn research" (Griliches 1958:419). Given this tremendous social rate of return, Griliches might well First the seed have felt justified in calling hybrid corn "one ofthe outstanding technological successes of the century." The series of articles Griliches wrote on hybrid corn (1957, 1958, 1960) provided a theoretical and methodological point ofdeparture for a substantial body of "returns-to-research" literature, much of which has focused on the performance of agricultural science. This line of analysis now constitutes a major sub-area within agricultural economics and has engaged most of the luminaries of that discipline.I The generally high social rates of return that economists have found to be associated with agricultural research expenditures have been extremely useful in defending the LGUs against the attacks to which they were subjected in the 1970S by populist, environmentalist, and labor groups and in providing a rationale for research appropriations at the state and federal levels. And hybrid corn's 700 percent annual return on investment remains the much cited and archetypal example of the substantial returns society enjoys from agricultural research: Hybrid com: fabulous or fable? So hybrid corn has occupied a preeminent position in the annals ofAmerican agricultural science. Interestingly, it was this very success that engendered Griliches' second thoughts on his analysis: One troublesome problem, however, remains to haunt us. Does it really make sense to calculate the rate of return on a successful "oil well"? ... What we would like to have is an estimate that would also include the cost of all the "dry holes" that were drilled before hybrid corn was struck. [Griliches 1958:426] This is a point of the greatest importance, but Griliches did not push it to its logical conclusion. Even more significant would be inclusion of the cost ofabandoning holes that might also have struck oil, and possibly at less cost. Though Griliches expresses the intention in his first article to learn something "about the ways in which technological change is generated and propagated in U.S. agriculture" (Griliches 1957:501), he does not critically examine the genesis of hybrid corn itself. Thus, he states, "As everyone knows, hybrid corn increased corn yields." That is true, but hybridization is but one of a variety of breeding techniques, and a full cost accounting should reflect the abandonment of productive wells as well as dry ones. That alternatives to hybridization were available is not idle speculation. In a highly regarded plant...

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