The Internet Is For Corn

We took a trip out to Springfield this weekend. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about corn.

On the drive, we passed miles and miles of dead corn. The drought that killed Heron Park has also had deleteroius effects on the local corn crops. At least it looked dead. Brown and dry and brittle. Granted, the type of corn grown here, Field Corn, looks brown and dead when it's ready for harvest. But that happens in late fall. Not mid-summer.

The green stuff is soybeans, the dead, brown stuff behind it is corn.

You may ask, James, what's this Field Corn nonsense? Well, allow me to give you the cheap tour of the world of corn.

The three major types of corn grown in the US include Field Corn, Sweet Corn, and Popcorn.

Field Corn has a low sugar content: you wouldn't find it very palatable. That's why we give it to livestock. Also, we make ethanol with it. Farmers harvest Field Corn dry (the dent stage), as a grain, late in the fall.

You know Sweet Corn as the tasty yellow vegetable you buy in grocery stores. Sweet Corn is actually a genetic mutation of Field Corn, discovered by the Native Americans, that causes the kernels to store more carbohydrates. Farmers today harvest Sweet Corn as a vegetable (the milk stage), when water content reaches 25%, typically early fall.

Interesting Fact: You can only make popcorn with Popcorn. That probably goes without saying. If you try to make popcorn with Sweet Corn, you get Corn Nuts. And Corn Nuts give you bad breath. Archaeologists have found evidence of Popcorn in South America as early as 4700 Bc. It provided a cheap food source during the Great Depression.

"I's a-goin' pretty fast, there wasn't even stoppin',
A-bouncin' up and down, like popcorn poppin'"
-Woody Guthrie

I should probably note he's singing about driving a Ford down a mountain road. Nothing else.

Illinois Farmers cultivate almost 30 million acres of farmland (Ok, that's a big number. It's the same as the entire metro areas of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin combined. It's half the state of Oklahoma.).  They are #2 in soybean and corn production. Field Soybean (I'll explain in a minute) and Field Corn (Iowa is #1 in Field Corn, Minnesota is #1 in Sweet Corn). They lead the US in horseradishes and pumpkins.

The two major types of soybeans include the Field and Vegetable varieties. Vegetable soybeans give us edamame and tofu. Over 90% of soybeans grown in Illinois are of the Field variety.

Field Soybeans taste like crap and are high in oil content (they probably taste like crap because they are high in oil content). In places like Decatur (Soy City), factories process the soybeans to extract the oil which is then used to make soybean oil (obviously), medicine, soap, ink, paint, cosmetics, and plastics (Remember Sam Wainwright? Hee-haw!) Also, soybean oil constitues one of the major ingredients in biodiesel.

The leftover pulp, liberated from its onerous oil burden, then gets packaged into livestock feed. Also, fishfood.

Soybeans, like clover and alfalfa, trap nitrogen in the soil and are useful as a rotation crop, replacing nutrients sucked up by corn. We have over 100 years of continuous research in (corn) crop rotation methods from the Morrow Plots on the University of Illinois campus.

First planted in 1876, the Morrow Plots are the oldest agricultural research field in the US and the second oldest in the world. The plots sit smack dab in the middle of campus. Popular tradition holds that the administration built the library underground so it wouldn't block the sunlight to the plots.

The Morrow Plots Sign.

The Morrow Plots wedged in between academic buildings. 

In the 1950s, the University's John Laughnan developed the popular Supersweet Corn (sh2) which contains 10 times more sugar than average sweet corn and has a longer shelf life.

To celebrate the University's long corn heritage, Urbana has celebrated the Sweetcorn Festival every August since 1975 (this year the 24th and 25th). On average, 40-50 thousand people converge on Urbana to eat themselves into Type II diabetes with Sweet Corn. If you ride your bike, you get a free ear.

Only, remember that Illinois grows mostly Field Corn? The farmland in Illinois that is devoted to Sweet Corn can't support the quantities needed for the festival, so Urbanites import most of the corn from other states. Nevertheless, this festival is one of the major cultural and social events of the year. You can put up your dukes and you can bet your boots that we will be in attendance. And I'll have a full post describing the goings on.