I was taking my offspring to school this morning and while waiting at a light, noticed acres of unharvested corn, full stalks with the cobs still attached. All around me. Everywhere.
I am in Maryland so for all intents and purposes, it is basically winter. Why would a farmer grow this and then leave it? I understand that it could be used for animal feed etc. but surely it must be far more lucrative to sell it as err… corn for people??
After I dropped the kids off, I proceeded on my way to work and I noticed more unharvested fields.
Sometimes you don’t have time to get it all in before winter. You lose some of the corn to animals and weather as time passes, but most of it is still there. They can harvest this corn anytime before spring. You may see a corn picker out there when the snow is not deep and the ground is frozen solid.
Sometimes it’s planted by game farms, DNR or other organizations to provide food for wild animals and it’s never picked.
Other times the owner died and the property is in the probate courts, or the inheritor doesn’t farm and has no concern about the crop that wasn’t brought in.
This year they were still harvesting sweet corn until the end of September, because everything was late or wiped out. Sometimes the corn is left in the hopes it will mature enough to salvage the crop.
Corn intended to feed animals and corn intended to feed people are two different types of corn.
It will keep on the plant for quite some time. The farmers around here (Indiana) also seem to be in no hurry to get the corn in during the fall. (As it happens, much of the corn around where I live is popcorn) Different varieties probably keep to a different degree. I suspect sweet corn - the stuff people eat at the dinner table - doesn’t tolerate freezing as well as the flint corn varieties, which have a lower water content. (Flint corn is largely animal feed, except for popcorn, which is also a type of flint corn. “Flint”, because when you try to bite it seems as hard as a rock). Corn used for ethanol synthesis - probably doesn’t matter when you harvest it, as taste is not a consideration.
If the field has been excessively wet during autumn, the farmer will probably wait until it’s frozen hard before going into it (wet fields and heavy farm machinery don’t mix.) Another reason is to continue to let the corn dry out while still on the stalk. As said, there’s risk by not getting all the crop out, but also risk from getting out there at the wrong time.
It’s also possible that the crop failed, despite visual appearance. Maybe the protein level is below a contracted or desired minimum? If so, the farmer can deal with it in a more leisurely fashion, though most failures get turned under prior to winter.
Out here in Chicago suburbia, you often have farmland which has been purchased for development. Every inch of fertile ground is being covered with strip malls and housing developments. Sometimes you find fields abandoned mid-season because the farmer has already received his bag o’ cash and has little incentive to stick around.
I have no idea if this would apply to your region, though.
We had this in an area I lived in. I don’t know why but farmers would often leave the fields like that. All it did was attract mice, squirrels, birds and deer.