Growth just to grow wasn’t so important at one time. Back in 1935, growth wasn’t a part of the formula required to succeed in agriculture. The focus then was on survival. Times were tough. The stock market crash of 1929 had left the country reeling...and as remote as agriculture was from Wall Street, even it took its hits.

A strange new product called “hybrids” had been introduced to the rural agricultural scene. To see a field of corn with every ear the same size and only one ear on each stalk was a revolutionary concept.

Within a few years, it was clear the new hybrids were doubling and tripling the yields of the open-pollinated corn. Even with the higher cost, these new hybrids were making corn growers more money per acre.

Gilbert Cornelius and his wife, Alice, decided they’d raise a couple of acres of seed corn and see how it did financially.

It did pretty well. They sold a few bags of it, and the neighbors thought so, too. Cornelius Seed Corn was born. The focus from the beginning was on performance and profit. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, farmers traded in their horses for horsepowered tractors and their open-pollinated corn fields for hybrid corn.

The 1960s brought much bigger equipment. Four-wheel drive was introduced and then, equipment went big...fast.

The 1970s let us witness how much insect weed control could really be attained as the chemical revolution took over.

The 1980s will best be forgotten as the decade that destroyed thousands of family farms as the ag economy took its toll. After that, the economy improved somewhat and stabilized.

The 1990s brought us biotech. New, improved, efficient ways of managing weeds and even insects through seed, not through increased chemical use, were an instant hit. And then Europe banned them. Today, they still have a home and the use is growing significantly, but the European ban on some biotech applications has slowed this revolutionary technology.

Through it all, Cornelius has maintained its focus on one thing...we believe making money is the corn grower’s goal. If you don’t make a profit planting seed corn, the brand, the dealer and the hybrids don’t make much difference.

So, through the eras of hybridization, equipment, chemicals, the economy, the expansion of farms and even the introduction of biotechnology, Cornelius Seed continues to focus on one issue: profitability. We breed hybrids for profit. We teach dealers to select and place them for profit. We hold down costs to maximize profit. And through it all, we’ve been able to make alot of customers happy because they made money. It’s how we’ve grown.

Now, the company has what is called momentum. More than ever, we’ve focused on putting products on your farm that make you money. We think it’s the way we’ll continue to grow for the next 65 years, too.

Click here to view Country Life article from the Maquoketa Sentinal in PDF format.

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