Corn

In my experience there are 3 reasons to grow corn, or three types of corn.  (Field, Sweet, and Seed)  I remember growing all three on the farm while growing up.  I do not know the why, for sure, but here is....

My impression of the farm and growing corn….  

It seems to me that the farm crops went from growing crops that were for survival, which progressed to money making crops, which were also for the survival of the farm.  In other words, life changed from growing what you used and had to have to survive to needing money to pay for the things you had to have or needed to survive.  (The reason I think this is that the crops earlier were all used on the farm to keep the cows and animals alive which fed the family.  Then as time changed the crops changed to crops that brought in money so that the farm could pay taxes and other things that were needed to keep the farm going.)

Corn for instance at first was field corn.  Field corn is used to feed animals and it is storable for feeding in the winter as silage.  You can identify a field of field corn by it being grown closer together and usually it is uniform in height.  It is usually taller, and the rows and seeds are planted closer together.  The important thing is to get a lot of stalk and leaves to chop up and store.   It isn’t important to have big ears so it can be grown closer together.  After it is chopped it is put into a pit, in our case, so that it can ferment (I don't know if that is necessary or just what it does as it is stored) to feed the cattle during the winter.   (pictured below is an exceptional crop of 13 foot, my Dad Robert DeCoursey grew)

Below, is a picture from the internet that shows corn all chopped up and ready to feed to animals or to be stored. (I don’t remember feeding the cows fresh chopped corn, we did feed them the leftovers from shucking the corn we ate at meals)

We had a pit down along the big drain ditch that it was put it.  I remember my brothers driving the jeep pickup down and scooping out wet, smelly (I liked it, that's why I used to go along) corn to take back to the stanchions and the cows would come running.  It was wet and warm (which is why I think it was fermented) so not only was it good and nutritious it was warm for the cows to eat during the winter months.

 We also grew sweet corn to eat and sell.  There was a local fruit and vegetable stand along the highway between Nampa and Caldwell that we would sell some to.  We (actually my older siblings, I think I was too young most of the time) would get up early and pick the corn into gunny sacks and deliver it.  It was sold for 25 cents a dozen at times at the market, so we made a lot less.  I think we got 50 cents a gunny sack full so maybe 10 cents a dozen.

One memory about sweet corn …

Grandma Hanks (pictured below) always had a cat or two around the farm to keep mice down.  She had a few special ones like the one in her arms here.   
 I remember that she had one that would go out in the garden and strip open a cob of corn and eat it right on the stalk.  It loved corn.   So, do I when it comes to eating it.

As I grew up the corn crop turned to seed corn.  Which meant that Dad would grow one kind of corn in four rows and then another kind in the fifth row so that one kind of corn would be pollenated by a different corn and thus make a hybrid of better corn.

It was tricky because different corn matures at different times as well as being affected by temperature, sun and water.    It was a matter of timing then to make sure that the tassel on the fifth rows would come out when the silk was out on the four rows which would make for cross pollination.  Cross pollination would combine two different corn varieties into one.  Which is why I had a job most summers when I was old enough 14 to 16.

(when you see a field that has four or five rows that look the same with a different one in-between like pictured below you know that they are creating a new variety, or seed corn.

If you want only the one kind of pollen hitting the silk the tassels of the other kind of corn had to be eliminated.  Which meant going up and down the field pulling out the unwanted tassels. 

That was called corn topping.

 

It had to be done before the pollen came out.  So, the pictured one above shows the tassel but it is already producing pollen so it would be too late to top.  If a fieldman (company man buying the seed) found too many tops like the above one in the cow rows (that is what the four or five same rows were called) they wouldn’t buy the seed because it wouldn’t be true hybrid.

The science is to make a hybrid corn by mixing one kind with another.  It was amazing to taste the difference.  It is a good process for making improvements in flavor, size, color, etc.

We had all kinds of corn to top.  I remember one year the corn was so tall we had to carefully pull over the top of the corn to reach the tassels (arms above the head all day).  Another time we called the corn pineapple corn because it was almost below our knees (we worked bent over all day).  Both of those kinds were miserable, so they come back to memory).   It was important work, fun, and boring and cold and wet and hot and dry, you name it we had it.  We had to be started early in the morning so often would be soaked through from the dew.  We tried to get finished by early afternoon because by then we were dry and hot.  It seemed like we should be able to go down the row and pull the top out of every stock and be done forever, but it seemed like there was always more showing up no matter how carefully it was done.  Most fields took four or more go throughs.  I know that many of the workers were not careful at all.  I was crew boss after Karen and Dave grew up and went away to school, so I fired many kids as well.  I have many memories from working in the corn fields, mostly good.

My dad is so amazing in every way.  He only had 1 year of college but knew more physics, mechanics, and chemistry than many professors.  

He was always thinking of better ways of doing things and would repair as well as improve and create equipment to assist in the work.   One dream was to take kids out of the field (especially since we were all growing up and would be going away to school and even more importantly is that the minimum wage was increased and it wasn't cost efficient to use kids that didn't know what they were doing half the time nor did they understand how important it was to do for the survival of the farm) and top corn by machine.  During the winter months he worked on this idea and machine.

 He finally had a prototype and tried it out.

It worked as it was supposed to except there is just too much variants in corn and the need in the timing of the topping.  The year he had it working the corn grew to thick and tall so the machine cut off too much which shocked the corn.

If he waited for the tassels to come up and out far enough to cut them off it was too late, the pollen would have spread.  So, in this one instance all his work and designing failed.  But it was still neat to me to see that it is important to always be thinking and looking for answers to problems.  There can be solutions found outside of the box or commonly used to be discovered.

The result of growing seed corn is seed.  So, after we topped the corn it would continue to grow and produce ears and then that was allowed to finally dry up and be harvested.  The ears would then be delivered to the seed company and they would knock the seeds off the ears and sell the seeds. 

Pictured below is my Dad securing a load of corn to take over.  A newspaper saw him and took a picture and published it one year.