I knew commercial operations use weird corn that didn't grow right in small quantities, but didn't know why. That's interesting!

While this IS a large field, it's privately owned by someone my parents go to church with, and they go on at length about how you can go straight from stalk to kitchen and save some for planting and blah blah blah. . I've always wanted to test that, but so far it's been "doesn't grow in small quantities" so I'm starting to think either the church friend is exaggerating, or my mother is filling in gaps that she thinks sound right.

There's a patch of about 50-100 stalks on the edge of my yard, I'm guessing some spilled when they were harvesting since they drive through that corner to get the semis out.

I actually tried growing store bought seeds last year, but it was a dismal failure. We moved back to this house after a few years away and didn't get around to setting up a real garden this spring, so it's laundry-bin potatoes and (fingers crossed) yard corn lmao.

I spent a bit of time as a commercial plant breeder. Most of the stuff you find online is inaccurate. Genetics and plant breeding is extremely complicated and species specific. It's not something the average master gardener even has the fundamentals to understand.

For example the answer to your question about saving hybrid corn seed.

One plant of a F1 commercial contains the same heterogenity as a healthy 1,000 plant OP variety population. Commercial hybrids are created by crossing inbreds from separate genetic pools. This helps maintain the required genetic distance between the inbreds to maximize heterosis.

1,000 F2 plants from one F1 is enough to initiate a stable population. Saving less than 1,000 plants on the subsequent generations will create a bottleneck and the population will quickly suffer from inbred depression.