Sugar-enhanced (“se”) sweet corns have been all the rage over the last few seasons. Seed companies have touted some of their products with phrases like “sweetest ever” and “candy sweet.” These naturally bred hybrids — no, they’re not genetically modified — seem to answer the All-American craving for sugary satisfaction. Now there’s an even more sugary designation for sweet corns — “supersweet” or “sh2″ — for those table corns that are all about the sugar.
With names like ‘Sweet Riser,” “Kandy Korn,” and “Sugar Ace,” these se and sh2 corns, most of them commercially grown, offer marketing potential in a way that plain-old sweet corn can’t. You don’t need to rush them home from the market and plunge them in boiling water to enjoy their sugary flavor. They’ve been bred to hold their sugars longer. One of the ironies in the advertising of these corns is the tie in to “old-fashioned” flavor. Of course, old fashioned flavor is available to anyone who’ll grow their own. You don’t need a new hybrid variety to enjoy delicious sweet corn.
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Eric is now retired, but is still a renowned gardener known for his expertise in composting, organic gardening and pest control, utilizing pesticide-free options, such as beneficial insects.
Eric believes when you do something good for the environment, the effects will benefit generations to come.
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The latest of these is the Amaize hybrid, developed by the Crookham Company of Caldwell, Idaho. Amaize, according to the Crookham Company, has been in development since 1989. It was the texture that attracted breeders George Crookham and Bruce Hobdey. Sweeter sweet corns were often flat and chewy, without that skin pop and flavor burst that good, fresh-picked sweet corn has. Crookham and Hobdey tried some 10,000 combinations of pollinated corns until they found the one that became Amaize. The corn, introduced in 2011, mimics fresh-picked quality with its sweetness and the crisp skin of its kernels.
The marketing campaign for Amaize has been something to behold. Ears were sent to writers, growers, and gourmets overnight delivery and raves started to pour in. The corn even has its own Facebook page (we’re sure you can find it yourself, if you’re so inclined; despite the popularity of the product few have seen fit to comment or otherwise accept invitations to respond to requests for positive opinions).
Available only commercially the last few years — in other words, the corn could only be found in select grocery chains and markets — it’s being offered for the first time this year to the home gardener as seed by a big distributor whose name we’re reluctant to speak.
If you do follow the link to the famous seed order house and read the Amaize description, you’ll notice something else that’s new, an assumed-by-purchase “restricted use” clause that limits the buyer to home garden growth and human consumption. The buyer, through purchase, agrees “not to distribute or sell the seed, crop or plants for any other purpose.”
Now seed patents have been around as long as hybrid commercial seed and seed companies. They’re often designed to protect profits derived from specific products. We can’t help but agree that breeders and companies who invest time and money to develop new products should have the result of their investment protected. But we have a hard time accepting that once a grower buys seed he’s unable to do anything else with it. Yes, it’s a controversy of the same sort that music buyers face. Once you’ve purchased music, shouldn’t you be able to share it?
The Amaize restriction is apparently there to protect commercial sale of the harvested product. Its okay that you raise and consume the product in your home, but don’t try to sell it at a roadside stand. There’s no kind of restriction on non-hybrid or heirloom seeds. In fact, the heirloom community is all about sharing what it has without limiting use of any kind. And that’s the rub.
GMO produced seed and the patents connected to it are another story altogether. The extent to which farmers are sought out and punished for even accidental cross-breeding has made a particular GMO seed producer to be considered particularly evil. But these sugar-enhanced corns are different as all hybrids are different from lab-made GMO seed. To argue it’s the same thing is foolish.
Expect to see more restricted use when it comes to commercially produced hybrid seed. And expect to see more discussion on restrictions placed on seed used by the home gardener. What restrictions are appropriate and fair? And which are an over-reach by the companies that produce them? Are patent laws — when it comes to food crop seed — fair? There’s a lot to consider, right up to and including the world’s food supply, when thinking about this issue. In the meantime, plan to plant some organic, heirloom corn.
Eric is now retired, but is still a renowned gardener known for his expertise in composting, organic gardening and pest control, utilizing pesticide-free options, such as beneficial insects.
Eric believes when you do something good for the environment, the effects will benefit generations to come.
- Complete Guide to Plant, Grow, and Care for Sunflowers - June 14, 2023
- Growing Potatoes in Containers: Complete Beginner’s Guide - June 14, 2023
- Peonies: How to Plant, Grow, and Care for Peony Flowers - April 23, 2023
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3 Responses to “Hybrid Sweet Corn – Sweeter Than Ever”
While I love the idea of hybrid corn, and other crops, the restrictions are not something I’m willing to support. As a long time systems engineer, I favor open source, open policies, and sharing, rather than proprietary source, closed policies, and withholding. The license for these seeds violates my moral code.
I find it laughable that people think they should be able to do whatever they want once they purchase the seed. Think about any other commodity. Is it ok to buy a CD and then copy it 100 times and sell those copies?
The reason for this restriction is to protect Crookhams investment. This is a NEW variety of corn that looks different from most yellow and bi-color corn. In order to market it and makes money Crookhams needed to get large growers to agree to plant it and also large customers to resell it. Since the growers and customers are taking a big risk when they plant and market this new product, they don’t want the market diluted by a bunch of roadside stands.
As a grower myself, who plans on planting this variety in 2015, I don’t want competition from the little back yard gardeners. This seed is EXPENSIVE. It is almost three times more than normal augmented sh2 bi-colors. I will need to invest in marketing, etc. in order to sell it. If I have to compete with every little backyard gardener than it destroys my incentive to grow this variety (at it’s higher cost).
Once this variety has been on the market for 5-10 years all of these “restrictions” will fall by the wayside. If this is a success then the commercial guys will get contracts to grow for the large retail chains and they won’t care about very small losses in sales to roadside stands.
As far as associating open source to seeds that have taken millions of dollars to develop and decades of work, that is laughable. If you want open source seeds grow the heirlooms. I guarantee you will be eating very little of them once you taste them. Traditional, non-gmo, breeding takes a lot of work and time. You should be thankful they have released seed for home gardeners. Many of the most successful commercial varieties are only made available in commercial size quantities and splitting and reselling is not allowed.
Matt, if you find some plants with seeds in the wild, and grow them on your farm, do you expect there to be restrictions on what you can do with them?
Problem is, if some of these seeds do end up in the wild, and someone harvests the seeds from the plants that grew from them and use them to grow on their farm, they’re guilty of violating the restrictions, even though they had no intention of doing so, thinking they’d found a wild variety.
Also, for some home gardeners, selling some of what they grow on a roadside stand is how they make a little extra money. If they aren’t allowed to do that, those seeds are just not something they’d want.
Anyway, it’s all up to people how they want to go about it. If the seller of these seeds wants to have these restrictions on them, they’re also going to have to live with that some people don’t want to buy it. I will certainly also stay clear of this seed.