I forgot about high fructose corn syrup.
Besides animal feed, that’s a large part of the corn crop. Coke and the food industry in general need a lot of it.
All those corn fields you drive by in Kansas are not meant for your BBQ.
A friend of mine is a mechanic at a Case dealer. About ten years ago I stopped by his workplace. He gave me a “tour” of one of their latest combines, and showed me how it worked. I was awestruck; the mechanisms were nothing short of amazing. I said, “Wow, who was the genius who came up with that?” He said, “It is not the result of one person. The design is the end-result from many decades of evolution.”
I remember one cool feature on the combine: it had a GPS receiver, along with yield sensors. The computer measured the yield variations in the field, and would adjust the amount of seed to plant in the following spring at various locations in the field. Or something like that; I don’t remember the specifics.
Dent corn and flint corn are two of the most common types of corn besides popcorn and sweet corn. Dent corn is starchier and is the one used for animal feed, corn syrup, tortilla chips, etc. Flint corn is harder and sometimes multicolored. It often has higher nutrient values and is used for hominy, cornmeal, and polenta.
“Combine” is short for “combination harvester thresher”. (I once attended the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, where they demonstrated the earlier non-combined versions of the machines.) The big mower thing on the front of the combine, the “header”, cuts the corn stalks off at the ground and pulls them into the body of the vehicle where it all gets beat to tiny bits (threshed) so they can blow away the lighter parts and keep the heavier kernels of grain. Farmers can swap for a different header on the front of the combine to harvest other crops, primarily soybeans or wheat.
I have not seen anyone use a silo to ferment silage, although I grasp that it is done elsewhere. In my corner of Illinois, dry grain is stored in bins and silos, and silage goes into huge pits or into plastic-covered linear piles.
I grew up in Mt. Pleasant and loved the Old Threshers Reunion! The whole town smelled of coal smoke. There are loads of videos of combine harvesters both old and new over at the Big Tractor Power Youtube channel. No explanations of how they work, just tractor porn with little commentary.
There is a Mt Pleasant in Pennsylvania. It is the location of Helltown Brewing, a very cool brewery. Can you guess Mt Pleasant, PA’s zip code?
15666
I’ve been to the Old Threshers Reunion to help run their on site trolley cars during the reunion. Saw lots and lots of heavy machinery with crowds of men with John Deere caps on, fondling. On the way there from New England we drove through what seemed like thousands of miles of highway surrounded by corn fields. Now I have a better idea of where all that corn goes.
In my neighborhood (NW Indiana) the fields are almost all corn and soybeans, and they switch crops on an annual basis, so it’s about a 50-50 mix. There is a small train line that connects a series of grain elevators, about one every 5 miles or so, and takes the dried corn kernels into town where there is a corn syrup plant.
This year there appears to have been a bumper crop, as evidenced by large, plastic grain bags lying in the field. These are huge, hundreds of cubic meters of volume, and I’ve not seen them in previous years. I have only lived here about one decade. These bags are for additional storage, and are a whole other topic.
On quiet winter nights, you can hear air blowers / dryers running in the mid-distance (about a mile away), which I believe are turned on to force hot air through the stored corn in the silos. This might dry them further, increasing their sugar/mass density, making it possibly more valuable per pound. I would suppose it also slows mold growth. TBH I’m not sure why these blowers exist, but I do recall they’re propane powered and I think they’re used for these two reasons.
Yea, the moisture content of corn is a big issue for farmers. If for example, the farmer’s corn has a moisture content of 18%, the buyer is going to charge them less per bushel because of shrinkage and utility costs (propane, natural gas) to dry the corn to the desired moisture content (usually between 13% and 15%).
Around where I live several famers (including some relatives of mine) plant seed corn. This is the corn that is harvested (still on the cob) and is processed for the following year’s crop at the seed company’s facility. Usually 1 row (male) that grows to normal height with the tassels allowed to develop, then 6 rows of plants (female) that has been detassled, then another male row. Repeats across the field. This allows the cross-pollination for hybrid corn. Buffer zones (likely soybeans, alfalfa, or oats) are planted between the fields if adjoining or across the road to prevent cross contamination from a different variety.
If a neighbor looks like they are planting sweetcorn in their garden within a certain distance (1/4 mile maybe?) the seed company will ask you not to plant and arrange with a local sweet corn seller to get your sweetcorn there.
Other varieties of corn such as popcorn and multi-colored (Indian) can really mess things up if it is cross pollinated into seed corn and I think it is a 1/2 mile, or more, buffer for them. The seed corn company has scouts looking at gardens in the area for these types of corn and will make it worthwhile for the owner not to grow the corn, either money or source the mature corn from a supplier and pay for it.
As someone who has shucked a lot of corn (almost all sweet corn for fresh consumption), if you approach it from the right angle, it’s pretty easy. I grab some of the “top” and pull, and do that one or two more times at different angles, and then snap the leaves and the end of the stalk off together (or just the leaves, if there isn’t much stalk) and it’s all very quick and doesn’t take much effort. As a kid, i struggled with this, but then i learned the knack.
It’s easy for me to imagine a machine doing that, pulling in two directions at once, especially with ripe field corn that won’t be easily bruised. Although I’m sure it took a lot of trial and effort to tune the machine.
Field corn is dry to the extent that the kernels are hard and the outside covering (husk) is also very dry, and is easily removed by the harvesting equipment. If you go into a corn field right before it is harvested the tops of the ears are visible as the husks have dried and started to pull away from the kernels/cob.
The corn (or other grain) needs to be dried down properly, or it won’t keep. I believe it’s not just a matter of mold, but also of bacterial growth or possible fermentation.
In many years in many locations it won’t dry down enough in the field; though it does have to have dried enough in the field that the dryers will be able to handle the remaining moisture in time. There are testers that can be taken out into the field to check the crop, before and during harvest. And as has been said it’ll be tested at the dryer, if the farmer doesn’t have their own dryers – I believe an overly wet load may be rejected.
The dryers, like the combines, come in various sizes, and around here where the farms are small and much of the crop is for on-farm use of livestock operations some of the farms have their own dryer setups; though there are also large commercial ones in the area for places that purchase grains from farmers for resale.
If I recall correctly, corn can be harvested when the kernel is at about 23% moisture content, and then mechanically dried to 14.5% (the commercial standard.) Obviously, the farmer wants to delay harvesting the crop and let the crop dry naturally, but the longer you let it stay in the field, the greater the chance the plants will be damaged and the yield reduced.
Yup. If the weather turns wet on you, that corn ain’t getting dryer – and your equipment may not be able to get into the field without doing damage to the soil tilth, or even without getting stuck. And if the deer find that nice field of standing corn – which they will – there’s going to be less corn in it every day.
So figuring out when to harvest is tricky. I’ve seen fields that couldn’t be harvested until the ground froze hard enough to bear the equipment, due to mud – with no idea when or, in the new climate, even if that was going to happen (the soil never froze hard here last year, for the first time in my memory and I think in the records.) Sometimes by the time it was possible to harvest there wasn’t enough standing corn left to bother. But you take it too early, and it might not be dry enough.
Farming’s an uncertain sort of enterprise, whatever you raise. What people who complain about surpluses don’t realize is that you have to aim for a national/world surplus every year; a big one. Otherwise, some years you’re going to be way short. But of course, when there is a surplus, nobody wants to pay much for any of it . . .
And BTW, the fences on the tops of silos are not because they are used as UFO landing pads. It’s because farmers go up there and work.
(yeah, some people wondered about that)
Some field corn is grown for seed, and that’s the corn that gets detasseled. There is a facility in my area that processes the ears, and a temp agency hires a bunch of people as “corn sorters” to visually inspect the ones that the laser scanner kicks out.
My parents’ house was next to a corn field. We made some parched corn once- take field corn and try to pop it like popcorn. What do you get? CornNuts (remember those?)
I briefly visited a Midwest salt cavern natural gas storage facility at a previous job. Un-odorized natural gas was stored in a human-made underground salt cavern built in a salt formation. The natural gas arrived via pipeline and left via truck and rail car. The natural gas loaded into the trucks was odorized with methyl mercaptan (the “natural gas smell”) but the rail cars were not odorized. Turns out, they were going to farms to dry corn and the odorant would ruin the corn.
Remember them? Corn Nuts are available at my local grocery store. I love 'em.