The only corn I’m familiar with is corn on the cob. Picked off the corn stalk, coated with butter and salt and eaten.
I see videos of large farms where heavy machinery drives through the corn field, seems to cut everything off at ground level, and feed it into a wagon or truck following along. The load then seems to go into a farm silo. Obviously NOT for corn on the cob!
Is this mixture of corn and corn stalks fed as-is to animals?
City-boy-just-wondering
After googling:
As silage, yes.
Modern field corn combines strip the stalk from the field, separate the ears from the stalk (and drop the stalk behind the combine), shuck the ears, and thresh the kernels off the cobs to be dropped into a holding bin or a grain trailer towed alongside. But the field corn had to have had a good drydown in the field.
Sweet corn harvesters do the same thing, except they don’t shuck or thresh the ears.
The stalks can be raked up afterwards and chopped into silage, which ferments slightly to become animal feed.
The combine literally combines many steps of harvest processing into one vehicle, but there are lesser degrees of integration, like a combine that harvests field corn and strips ears but leaves shucking and threshing (or just theshing) for later. I assume the difference is what the farmer considers their workflow and resources, like they already have access to a thresher on their farm or at a co-op, and can economize on a combine that does less.
Thanks! Ignorance fought.
It can depend on the degree of ripeness at harvest. In a bad year, I’ve known farmers to harvest for silage a crop they’d originally planted intending it for a grain harvest; instead of the machinery separating out the grain and stalks in that case, it all gets chopped for silage. That gives them some use out of a crop that due to weather problems wasn’t going to ripen enough to produce dry grain corn.
Sometimes however silage was the intended use from the beginning.
Note that a silo, the tall tower often seen around farms, is what silage is put in. The word “silo” is one of the few borrowings from Basque into English.
Based solely on a documentary I saw a decade ago.
I thought animal feed corn and human consumption corn were very different. The animal feed corn taste horrible. I guess if your human consumption corn doesn’t work out you can sell it as animal feed corn. But it doesn’t work the other way around.
No, it doesn’t. But it’s not as sweet or as tender as sweet corn, even when harvested at sweet corn stage (which it isn’t, except by somebody who just wants to try an ear.)
Sweet corn is harvested immature, which is why it’s tender. Fully mature corn of any type is way too hard for humans to chew; though it can be ground into meals or flours. There are various types, some of them better for human consumption as cornmeal than others.
And then there’s popcorn. There are a whole lot of different corns.
ETA: You can feed sweet corn to livestock if you happen to have some livestock around, but it’s not going to be salable as livestock feed because, again, it’s harvested immature and it’s not going to keep. And if you let it go to dry corn stage I don’t think it’s going to have ideal protein etc. content – humans usually get a lot of their protein otherwise. You could certainly throw it to your own chickens, but again I don’t think it would sell well. But I’m not a livestock farmer and am not sure of this.
For on-the-farm videos that are pretty entertaining and comprehensive, check out “The Veggie Boys” on Youtube. You’ll learn more than you ever imagined about corn and harvesting.
For some dumb reason I was researching corn while you were typing your post.
This link would seem to support your view that field corn is in fact used for human consumption as in corn meal etc.
But it’s not the sweet corn you buy at the farmers market. Most people would find field corn unpalatable.
From the J.L. Hudson seed catalog:
“I have come to like field corn for on-the-cob eating, preferring its robust, hearty qualities. It is especially good Central American style, roasted over an open fire, and rubbed with a lime dipped in chili powder and salt.”
Most people these days are used to huge amounts of sugar in their food.
Most sweet corn on the market these days is supersweet varieties. “Supersweet” isn’t just a description, it’s the actual name of the type of corn; there are multiple varieties of supersweets but they share specific genetics. Supersweets are what you’re going to find in the store because they hold their sweetness much longer than older sweet corn types; “normal sugary” varieties start losing sweetness almost as soon as they’re picked and “sugary enhanced”, while they keep sweetness longer than “normal sugary”, don’t hold it as long as supersweets. Because modern food systems rely on everything having as long a shelf life as possible, supersweets are what’s going to be in the grocery store.
To me, they just taste like sugar; not like corn at all. I’ll eat the stuff if somebody gives it to me, but it’s not really worth bothering with. Field corn harvested immature tastes like corn, and slightly sweet. Nobody that I know of sells it that way, but some people who grow field corn (or live next to/visit someone who does) eat it that way. Normally-sugary sweet corn eaten ideally immediately after harvest and certainly within a day is fantastic, by far the best of the lot; but you probably won’t find it now unless you grow it yourself. Sugary enhanced eaten within a couple of days of harvest is pretty good, and you might find some of that at a farmers’ market if you’ve got a good one.
So I suppose the question is partly “what do you mean by unpalatable?”
I have regularly bought and shucked corn for corn-on-the-cob. I’m curious exactly how the automated processes would shuck corn. Form this thread I gather commercial corn is more like popcorn kernels, dried to a hard finish. But it’s still inside that tough-to-remove leafy cover…?
Not sure how the machinery works; but it separates those hard mature kernels from the cob as well as from the husks and stalks. I’ve seen such combines running, with a truck alongside: a stream of kernels going into the truck, chopped stalks back out into the field. How that’s accomplished inside the combine I don’t know, though I’m sure those of my neighbors who use them do.
When the whole plant’s harvested for silage, that’s done while the stalks are still green. Much more digestible (by livestock) nutrition in them at that point. With small grains the dry stalks are often harvested as straw, for mulch or bedding, at least in areas with mixed farming systems; with corn returning the remaining organic matter and nutrients to the field may be the more common use. I don’t think I’ve ever seen corn straw around here – though I just looked it up and it is apparently sometimes baled for bedding.
Here’s a video (though my neighbors are using smaller and older ones, no GPS/computer stuff involved, the rest of the appearance is pretty similar):
The OED says “silo” is from Spanish. Etymology Online says that the Spanish word may be derived from a “pre-Roman Iberian language”, which the current Basque word “zilo” also derives from. So I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the English word derives from Basque; it derives from Spanish, and the Spanish word also doesn’t derive from Basque, but may be cognate with a Basque word.
– OK, I found a video showing how a combine works; though the amount of time spent explaining that is about a tenth the time they spend being verbally awestruck by the size of some of the farms. (My neighbors’ corn fields are more like 20 acres. Which is why the combines are smaller. The missing computer stuff is partly because they’re Old Order and partly because, if your combine still works, why would you spend all that money on a new one?)
Are you unfamiliar with corn as a grain? the basis for corn cereals (e.g. Corn Flakes), corn chips, cornbread, corn tortillas, etc.
corn kabobs, corn creole, corn gumbo, pan fried corn, deep fried corn, stir-fried corn, pineapple corn, lemon corn, coconut corn, pepper corn, peppercorn corn, corn soup, corn stew, corn salad, corn and potatoes, corn burger, corn sandwich… That’s about it.
Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup . . .