It was an ordinary day. Reading in my morning newspaper about taking a late-summer country drive in the Midwest. Along the way you will more than likely see row after row after row of 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out everything other than the sun and an occasional water tower. The skyscraper-like corn is a part of rural America's scenery as much as red barns and cows. But soon, the towering corn will be a thing of the past, replaced by stalks only half as tall as the green giants that have dominated the fields for so long. "As you drive across the Midwest, in perhaps the next 10 years, you will see a lot of corn that is half sized developed by Bayer Crop Science, developed to prevent the 12-foot high corn from being destroyed in the powerful windstorms that now roam the landscape. The corn is being tested on about 30,000 acres in the midwest with the promise of offering farmers a variety that can withstand powerful wiindstorms that could become more frequent due to climate change. The corn's smaller stature and sturdier base enable it to withstand winds of up to 50 mph - researchers hover over fields with a helicopter to see how the plants handle the wind. The smaller plants also let farmers plant at greater density, so they can grow more corn on the same amount of land, increasing their profits. The smaller stalks could also lead to less water use at a time of growing drought concerns. U.S. farmers grow corn on about 90 million acres each year, usually making it the nation's largest crop. So it's hard to overstate the importance of a potential large-scale shift to smaller-stature corn, said Dior Kelley, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who is researching different paths for growing shorter corn. "It's huge. It's a big, fundamental shift," Kelley said. Researchers have long focused on developing plants that could grow the most corn, but recently there has been equal emphasis on other traits, such as making the plant more dought-tolerant or able to withstand high temperatures. Although there already were efforts to grow shorter corn, the demand for innovations soared after an intense windstorm - called a derecho - plowed through the Midwest in August of 2020. The storm killed four people and caused $11 billion in damage, with the greatest destruction in a wide strip of eastern Iowa, where winds exceeded 100 mph. In Cedar Rapids, the wind toppled thousands of trees, but the damage to the corn crop only weeks from harvest, was especially stunning. "It looked like someone had come through with a machete and cut all of our corn down," Kelley said. Although Kelley is excited about the potential of short corn, she said farmers need to be aware that cobs that grow closer to the ground could be more vulnerable to diseases or mold. Short plants also cold be susceptible to a problem called lodging, when the corn tilts over after something like a heavy rain and then grows along the ground. Bayer expects to ramp up its production in 2027, and Leake said he hopes that by later in this decade, farmers will be growing short corn everywhere. "We see the opportunity of this being the new normal across both the U.S. and other parts of the world," he said. I only hope they can create the new variety while I am still around to see it and perhaps have a chance to eat some of it. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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| The old style corn on the left with the new, short corn on the right. |
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