AGRICULTURE: Revolution in Chickens?

Henry Browne Wallace got his start in the chicken business when he was a twelve-year-old Des Moines schoolboy On Easter Sunday 1926, his mother gave him a dozen baby chicks from the dime store and he began raising them in his backyard, with some advice from his father, Henry Agard Wallace. No politician then father Henry was spending his time developing his hybrid corn,* forming the Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co. to sell the seed, and editing Wallaces’ Farmer. When the corn became a success (over 99% of Iowa corn springs from some brand of hybrid ternel), young Henry decided to revolutionize the poultry business with hybrid chickens as his father had helped revolutionize corn growing.

Last week, after 13 years of experimentation, young Henry was well on the way He had sold 15 million of his hybrid chickens this year and his Hy-Line Poultry Farms (a subdivision of his father’s seed company) expects to sell more than 20 million more in the 1950 season. Only about 475,000 chicks came directly off the four Wallace farms last year; the others were raised by breeders on a royalty basis or hatched from eggs sold to poultrymen at fancy prices. Noting that 9% of Iowa’s chickens were already hybrids, young Henry predicted: “In seven years, 90% of all poultry farmers in the corn belt will be using hybrids.”

Mornings at 7. Young Henry gets up at 6 a.m. every morning. To save time, he shaves with an electric razor at the breakfast table, manages to read the paper at the same time. He is at his Des Moines office by 7, frequently returns to it at night. “No use of my going to a movie,” he explains, “because I just think about the work.”

Medium height (5 ft. 10½ in.) and rangy, Henry is a 34-year-old copy of his father —bristling eyebrows and all. He also has some of his father’s food fads (he eats 1,300 eggs a year), doesn’t smoke or drink “Never got around to trying”). But he has no interest in politics (he dodges questions about his father because “father gets castrated so often in print”) and reads only books or magazines pertaining to his work.

Freak Beaks. On paper, his work looks simple. A hybrid chicken is merely the offspring of a mating between two different strains which have been carefully inbred for generations. This offspring inherits all the favorable characteristics of his purebred ancestors as well as a mysterious extra something called “hybrid vigor”: a phenomenal capacity for growth and performance. Actually, the breeder may run through hundreds of combinations before he hits a “nick”—trade slang for a good hybrid. Wallace’s nick didn’t come until 1942, after six years of tedious experimentations. In one year, he had to throw out 34,000 chicks from a carefully bred flock of 36,000 birds. Many of the rejects were weird freaks spawned by the intensive inbreeding: blind chickens, baldheaded chickens and cockeyed-looking birds whose beaks crossed at right angles.

But when Wallace finally got his hybrid, it started laying eggs earlier in the season than other breeds, laid larger eggs and more of them. In test runs sponsored by Iowa State College, four flocks of his hybrids netted an egg profit of $3.88 a hen a year, while other leading breeds brought in only 70¢ to $1.44 a bird. Average production of the hybrids was 247 eggs per chicken while none of the others broke through the 200 mark.

Egg Trouble. Although the U.S. is now glutted with eggs, thanks to the farm support program (TIME, Oct. 3), widespread use of hybrids like the Hy-Lines might solve that problem eventually. Hybrids could enable farmers to produce so cheaply, says Wallace, that they could accept much lower prices and still make a profit. Not all customers who have bought hybrids like them. Some say that the birds are too jittery. Furthermore, hybrid eggs might not be preferred in every market: a light cream color, the eggs are too dark for New Yorkers who like white eggs and too light for Bostonians, who like them deep brown. And hybrid pullets cost 60¢ each, about twice the price of ordinary birds.

But hybrids have done so well that the DeKalb Agricultural Association, Inc., an other major producer of hybrid corn, is about ready to invade the market with hybrids of its own. Young Henry thinks that’s fine since it will help sell the idea.

Said he: “Hybrid chickens today are right at the point that corn was 13 years ago.”

*Wallace was one of the first to market a commercial strain of hybrid seed, but he did not invent the process. Many present-day methods of hybrid corn production can be traced back to the work of Professor George H. Shull around 1906 at the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.