The good, the bad, and the ugly. Tillers take the cake on all 3, depending on who you talk to you & which crop you're looking at.
Alfalfa, definitely good.
Wheat, probably good.
Sorghum, mostly good.
Corn... all bets are off, hold on to your hat!
But wheat, sorghum, & corn are all grasses. So what's the difference here?
Excellent question. To answer that, we need to look at basic plant morphology and development, as well as historic public opinion. To get a good, basic foundation on what a tiller is and where they come from, read my blog post So what's a tiller anyway? (click to follow link).
Plant morphology refers to the external structure of the plant - the different parts, how they fit together, their shape, etc. For example, the development of tillers can drastically change a plant's morphology because they are essentially branches.
Consider a wheat plant and a corn plant. Wheat is shorter, thinner, and smaller overall when compared to the tall, bulky, and robust corn plant. The structure of wheat allows for tillers to appear more easily because more light can get to the crown, for example. Corn's large leaves and tall stalks reduce the amount of light able to reach the ground. Its tillers will also have to be large to be competitive, which can put a high load on the resources the plant has available!
Plant development refers to the way the different plant parts are formed and more specifically, when they appear. For our purposes, we'll focus on when tillers start to show themselves in these plants.
Continuing with our previous example, wheat tillers appear very early in the plant's life, so much so that the second development stage is specifically identified by the formation of tillers! (Feekes Stage 2) Corn is very different, in that tillers do not appear until stage V5 (fifth collared leaf) or later, and they may not appear at all. This late appearance means the tillers are likely less competitive with their larger "mother" plants. Tillers in corn are highly unpredictable. In the field, one plant might have two tillers while its neighbors have none.
Historic public opinion is something that contributes strongly to the way we see and think about things. Agronomists, researchers, and producers alike generally agree that tillers in corn are bad in all situations, but there is little to no current research evidence to support ANY claim - good or bad.
From the time dent corn was first developed as a species, breeding efforts were focused on producing a single-stalked plant, and the preferred modern corn hybrids produce a uniform field of predictable and single-stalked plants. BUT, how do we know plants like this are the most efficient way to produce corn in all situations? Yield is yield, no matter where it comes from.
As a scientist, my goal is not to prove corn tillers are good or bad. My job is to find the facts, no matter what those are. We're diving deeper into the ingredients behind tiller development to discover not only what is happening, but why it's happening. For more info on this project, click here!
We're working towards clearing confusion and finding conclusions in the historic corn tiller conundrum.