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Show o NEW POP CORN VARIETY POPS TO GREATER SIZE Pop-corn specialists have surpassed the record of two blades of grass for one. Through selection, they have produced a new strain which pops to twenty-six times its volume. Tha new strain, a yellow pearl pop corn named Sunburst, was produced during a 7-year peroid by agronimists of the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture in cooperation with the Kansas Agricultural Agricul-tural Experiment Station. They produced the new strain by testing ears of pop corn and retaining for seed the ones which gave the greatest volume of popped corn. The tpt. .nnRi'sfprl nf Tmnninc. n Rmnlp of the seed from, each of the selected ears and measuring the volume of the resulting popped corn. Each sample was also tasted for flavor and texture. The remainder of the seed on the good ears was kept and planted the following follow-ing year. The process was then repeated. re-peated. Although the testing was a long job, it proved worth the effort in producing better popping corn. It took one man a day to test from 60 to 75 ears of corn.. However the new strain showed an average of twenty-six times the volume of seed when popped while queen Golden, the variety from which Sunburst was developed, gives slightly more than ninteen times the volume of the grain. Such carefull selection of seed, while not practical for the small grower, grow-er, has possibilities for the commercial commer-cial grower of pop-corn seed, declare the agronomists who make the Kansas tests. o |