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Corns Seeds are Seed Growers Working with Plant Breeders

At Corns Seeds they don’t just grow seeds, they also work with the plant breeders who develop those seeds.

The Corns family has been farming for four generations. In that time, they’ve always focused on innovating in order to grow and keep the farm going for the next generation.

“Land stewardship has always been a really big focus on our farm. We’re kind of born and bred farmers. So, we’ve always paid a lot of attention to what varieties are going to do well here and what varieties are going to leave the land in good shape,” Whitney Corns says in a phone interview.

Her grandfather Harvey Corns was the one who started the family’s interest in the seed industry. In the 1960s, Harvey started growing rye seed for Progressive Seeds, but it wasn’t until the 1990s when brothers Bryan and Gary (Whitney’s father) Corns started the family’s pedigreed seed business. Whitney herself returned to the family farm six years ago after a stint working in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia in the wine industry.

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Designing a Robotic Berry Picker

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Since blackberries must be harvested by hand, the process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To support a growing blackberry industry in Arkansas, food science associate professor Renee Threlfall is collaborating with mechanical engineering assistant professor Anthony Gunderman to develop a mechanical harvesting system. Most recently, the team designed a device to measure the force needed to pick a blackberry without damaging it. The data from this device will help inform the next stage of development and move the team closer to the goal of a fully autonomous robotic berry picker. The device was developed by Gunderman, with Yue Chen, a former U of A professor now at Georgia Tech, and Jeremy Collins, then a U of A undergraduate engineering student. To determine the force needed to pick blackberries without damage, the engineers worked with Threlfall and Andrea Myers, then a graduate student.