Farming - Corn
The single most productive crop in the world is corn.
It grows bigger & faster than any other grain in the world.
It is one of the important crops of Eldred
and too many of us have very little knowledge about it.
I hope this page will help correct that.
If you have any questions or corrections to this post please use the contact form below.
When I say corn, most of you will think of corn on the cob and
wonderful summer bar-b-ques.
Many of us will also think of buttery fingers in a movie house eating popcorn
that was way overpriced and sometimes a bit stale.
But there are lots of things we do not know about corn. For example, the names of the parts of corn, like the ear or cob, kernels, husk, stalk or silk. The silk, or the hair is very interesting - did you know there is one hair per kernel of corn on each ear?
Corn fields are particularly abundant in the state of Iowa, but as you probably know, you can find them all over the U.S. And most definitely in Pennsylvania.
Why am I so interested in corn? Several years ago, Renee and I bought a farm.
It was not a life's dream, it was not even a plan. It just kind of happened by accident.
With the farm we felt came a responsibility. It was now up to us to support the American farmer and the great American traditions of farming from which this nation sprung.
An interesting side fact: our neighbor, just down from our east field, let a film company "borrow" his farm & house to film a major motion picture.
While it was nice to hear that Tara Reid and Cloris Leachman were eating hoagies from our general store, it did bother the local wildlife for awhile.
One night, coming home very late, I found a huge herd of deer in the middle of our country road. They would not get out of my way, something in the "fields" was scaring them more than me and my car - it was the production crew and their huge stadium lights and camera booms...lol
If you are ever tempted to stop by a field of corn and pick a few ears - don't bother.
99% of the corn you see is known as "dead" corn or field corn,
as opposed to sweet corn or ensilage corn.
Dead corn is too hard for us to bite into. It can only be eaten if it is ground into
a fine powder and then used in making foods.
If you are thinking about growing your own corn in the backyard you should know this - you only get one or two ears of corn per stalk (per plant).
If you do try, do not plant them in rows like you see in the fields, plant them in squares. The individual stalks need to "fertilize" one another,
so they need to be crowded together.
Modern farming relies on huge, powerful, complex, expensive machines.
In the photos above you see a corn "combine" or harvester. It is "picking" the corn and then shooting the individual tiny corn kernels into the back of a truck.
Farmers wait to harvest the corn until it has dried out.
This way there is less chance of it becoming moldy in storage.
I imagine the harvesting machine is called a "combine" because it combines
several harvesting operations in one. It picks the plant, separates the
corn cob from the stalk, "skins" the husk off the cob
and then finally picks the individual corn kernels.
A top of the line combine can cost around $400,000.
The combine "shoots" the kernels into a "dump" truck that is carefully
moving alongside at the same speed. The truck fills up in just a few minutes and has to drive off and dump the corn and return. The combine has a large hopper on top so that it can continue to operate in the absence of the truck.
This is the front of the combine. There are different types for different crops.
When harvesting wheat, they use a revolving head that looks like an old-fashioned hand-pushed lawn mower.
This picture totally fails to show how scary looking this machine looks. The first time we saw one, it was on the road traveling slowly from one field to another.
Those front end cones, in person, look un-worldly. Their actual function
is to squish rows of corn together to feed them into the combine.
Most of these combine photos are from Iowa, but machines around here
look just the same.
This is our north field after harvesting and after being prepared for the next crop.
I asked Renee to run to the far end, she just gave me a "look". So I drove her there and dropped her off and drove back to the other end to take this picture.
One acre of corn can yield 5 tons of corn.
A combine can collect 60 to 80 acres of corn a day.
It would be reasonable for you to wonder what all of this corn is used for.
I have about 6 corn on the cobs a year, maybe three cans of corn or frozen
corn as a side with a meal, maybe a few corn dogs,
and like General MacArthur and Granny Clampett
I own a couple of corn cob pipes.
But that certainly does not account for all the corn that is grown in the U.S.
Maybe most of our corn becomes cereal?
Sorry, if that is your guess, you would be terribly wrong.
Only 2% of the U.S. corn was used for cereal in the last growing season.
3% was used for fructose corn syrup (look on the nutrition labels of candy,
soda, bread, some yogurts, baked goods, cereal (yep), mac & cheese and hundreds of more foods - fructose seems to be everywhere).
We actually export 7 times the amount of corn we use for cereal to other countries.
10% of all corn is fed to cows, 11% fed to pigs and 13% to chickens.
The biggest use of our corn is for fuel alcohol - 38%.
I hope you have enjoyed our little journey.
It would be great if this encourages you to find out more about American farming and about corn.
Please use the form below to contact us to correct any typos or errors, or to share info that we may not know.
And of course we would love to hear from you, even if just to say hello!