WYOMING, Iowa (AP) — Late-summer drives in the Midwest take you through the corn zone, where you’ll wind between 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out everything but the sun and the odd water tower.
These huge ears of corn are as much a part of country America as big red barns and calm cows.
But soon, those huge rows of corn might be replaced by ones that are only half as tall as the green giants that have been the stars of the fields for so long.
A farmer in eastern Iowa named Cameron Sorgenfrey has been growing newly created short corn for a few years, which has sometimes made other farmers look confused. “If you drive across the Midwest in the next seven, eight or ten years, you’ll see a lot of this,” he said. “This seems like it will change farming in the Midwest.”
Bayer Crop Science created short maize, which is currently being tested on about 30,000 acres (12,141 hectares) in the Midwest. This is so that farmers can get a type of maize that can handle strong winds, which may happen more often because of climate change.
The maize can stand up to winds of up to 50 mph because it is shorter and has a stronger base. Scientists fly over fields with helicopters to see how the plants handle the wind.
Farmers can plant more of the smaller plants together, which means they can grow more maize on the same amount of space and make more money. That’s especially helpful for farmers because prices have been low for a long time and are expected to stay low.
With drought fears rising, the smaller stalks could also mean less water is used.
Every year, U.S. farmers grow corn on about 90 million acres (36 million hectares), making it the country’s biggest crop. Dior Kelley, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who is studying different ways to grow shorter corn, said that a possible large-scale switch to shorter corn would be very important.
Farms in the United States grew more than 400 tonnes (363 metric tonnes) of maize last year. Most of it was used to feed animals, make ethanol or send to other countries.
“It’s very big.” It’s a big, important change, Kelley said.
For a long time, researchers have been trying to make plants that could grow the most maize. But lately, they have also been focussing on other traits, like making the plant better at handling drought or high temperatures.
Even though people were already trying to grow shorter maize, after a derecho, a very strong windstorm in August 2020, private companies like Bayer and university scientists were asked to come up with new ideas.
Four people were killed and $11 billion worth of damage was done by the storm. A wide area in eastern Iowa, where winds were over 100 mph, saw the most harm.
A lot of trees were knocked down in places like Cedar Rapids by the wind, but the damage to a maize crop that was only a few weeks away from being picked was especially shocking.
He said, “It looked like someone with a machete had come through and cut all of our corn down.”
One farmer in Iowa who had to deal with the derecho said, “Most of my corn looked like it had been steamrolled.”
Kelley is excited about what short corn could do, but she warned farmers that cobs that grow closer to the ground might be more likely to get diseases or mould. A problem called lodging can also happen to short plants. This is when the corn leans over after it rains a lot and grows along the ground, Kelley said.
A spokeswoman for Bayer, Brian Leake, said that the company has been working on short maize for over 20 years. Stine Seed and Corteva are two other companies that have been working for at least ten years to give different kinds of short-corn.
The main goal has been to make maize that can stand up to strong winds, but experts have also found that a shorter stalk makes it easier for farmers to get into fields with tools to do things like spread fungicide or plant a cover crop that will grow back later.
Bayer plans to make more in 2027, and Leake said he hopes that all farmers will be growing short maize by the end of this decade.
“We think this could become the new normal in the U.S. and other places around the world,” he said.