Co-Creating Hybrid Corn

Histories of hybrid corn have largely been written through the American experience of scientific breeding and the commercialization of hybrid seed. This article argues that the early European development of hybrid corn followed a different trajectory. Focusing on Galicia in northwestern Spain, it shows how international advances in genetics were adapted through sustained collaboration between researchers and farming communities. Drawing on the archives of the Galician Biological Mission and its fieldwork branch, the Seed Producers Trade Union, the article demonstrates that farmers' knowledge shaped breeding decisions, cultivation practices, and systems of seed production and distribution. Rather than portraying innovation as the one-way transfer of scientific expertise, the Galician case reveals a model of scientific co-creation in which public institutions, international research networks, and local agricultural communities jointly produced Europe's first double hybrid corn. In doing so, the article offers an alternative history of agricultural innovation before World War II.

Historical and socio-economic studies of Spain and related regions · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies in Science