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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>  Keep planting your own 
> seeds and select each year those fruits that did the best

And no mistake that right out of the seed packet, the hybrid plants resist 
disease better ... all things being equal.

But I'd add these provisos:

1)  Plant breeding has the chemical gardener frimly in mind when they test 
plants and come up with hybrids.  A plant that grows staunch and stong with a 
larder of chemical salts available will not necessarily do so well in organic 
soils.  The phenomenon of organic soils as they relate to food production is 
still largely unexplored compared to the time and attention lavished on 
chemical 
farming.  I haven't done any actual controlled experiments, lacking the time 
and interest.  But I have noticed, for example, that in my stone-age method 
of 
growing hard corn for meal, the hybrid corn will puny and yellow if not 
indulged in large amounts of chemical nitrogen.  The OP corn greatly 
outproduces it.

This phenomenon isn't liminted to plants.  We've had people urge their over 
bread milk goats on us, so overbread the billygoats have udders (I'm not 
kidding).  The spiel is that the goats produce so much more milk than our 
hardscrabble flugle goats.  And they indeed do, given a very expensive milk 
inducing 
diet to both goats, the super-milk goats will produce more.  But once you 
turn 
them out to the brambles on the hillside, the difference disappears.

I've found that to hold true with so many hybrid plants as well.  Given a 
soil heavy with compost and humus, they don't seem to know what to do with it 
and 
perform not much better than the OP's.  Tomatoes are an exception, but I 
still grow mainly OP tomatoes.  Mainly.

A lot of the whoop over the increased yields for hybrids is from commercial 
growers who are using machines or (nearly) slave labor to harvest.  If a 
tomato 
crop yields 10% more tomatoes, it means the difference between loss and 
profit for the agribusiness farmer.  But on the homestead, what does it 
matter?  
I'm going to get so many tomatoes beyond my needs and very modest market 
sales 
that I'm going to be feeding them to the pigs and chickens anyway.  10% or 
even 
40% more yield is almost meaningless.

2)  It has taken years for me to confrim my suspicions about this, but I 
have:  a garden plant grown from saved seed, selected seed of course, will 
not 
only tend to give a stronger more resistant plant, but  a plant adapted to 
local 
conditions.  After trying to grow blue corn without much success, I got a 
handful of seeds from the Native Seed Exchange and got a puny crop the first 
year. 
 Small wonder, it's a desert variety being grown in the temperate rain 
forest.  By the fifth year, it was heavily rooted, thick stalked corn giving 
10" fat 
ears of corn.  The biggest conformation of this was when I got some Jacob's 
Cattle beans from a Mainer and saved the seeds for several years.  During one 
bad year I ended up with only a pint of seed beans and so asked for some more 
(they sell them in grocery stores up there).  Under nearly identical 
conditions, the beans I had sved for seveal years grew great candelabras of 
bushy plants 
hanging with long pods.  The plants from the new seed were not nearly so deep 
green and yielded shorter ill-filled pods.