Shelling corn / ready for planting.

As a farming practice saving seed was just how it was done until hybrid corn was invented.

  Just to show how backwards I have been, until my seed cleaning guy retired 2 years ago  most all my barley and oats seed has been home raised. I would buy 1000 or 2000 pounds of certified seed, and then save all that part of the crop for seed. Being somewhat more careful to clean, combine and truck bins to not have other seed in them. Repeated until it seemed prudent to get some new certified seed. Way cheaper to grow and clean your own, in many cases. Tied many "new" wonder varieties of barley over the years. Many did real good one year and a complete bust the next. Or the grain brokers local would come up with new trait to charge dockage on. One of the best of those was the kernel was to thin. Bushel weight had always been the standard that quality was measured from in the feed barley market, locally. It was exhalant in the bushel weight measure, so the new standard was how thick the seed was.    THICKS OF THE TRADE of being a grain broker.

My world has changed and as far as I know very little Land Grant University seed development work going on out here.  So any new variety is on patent, so seed saving is going away FAST. But I am ready to hang the farming up and just run a few cows. 

I sure don't recommend it, but I had pallet of barley seed cleaned in 2011, that got lost in the warehouse. Planted it in 2022, was more dust than seed because of weevil damage. Dispite drought conditions a lot more of it grew than I could of hoped for. Was going to cut for hay, but because of drought just turned the cows on it.

So anyway I don't think seed saving in the 1930's was driven by the Depression. Many corn farmers had not seen the benefits of high yielding hybrid corn yet.

Thanks Macon for sharing a bit of your live. And keeping some old traditions alive, along with old time proven varieties of corn.