The Complete Handbook of Corn

Chapter 1: Understanding Corn

CORN IS A SINGLE SPECIES OF GRASS, Zea mays, domesticated from a wild grass called teosinte roughly 9,000 years ago in what is now southern Mexico. Every ear of corn you have ever seen, whether a bicolor sweet corn at a roadside stand or a field of #2 yellow dent destined for a feedlot, is a descendant of that plant. That shared ancestry is the entire basis of this book. All corn performs the same biological functions, and those functions dictate how you must handle it, whether your goal is a perfectly sweet cob for a family dinner or a truckload of grain that meets a specific contract weight.

The immediate thing to understand is that a corn kernel is not a seed the way a bean is a seed. The plant does not scatter its seeds, and it cannot self-propel into a dormant state that lasts forever. A corn kernel is a tightly contained package of a living embryo (the germ) and a supply of stored energy, wrapped in a protective pericarp (the hull). Development is rapid and aggressive. Under the right conditions of warmth and moisture, the kernel will germinate and grow into a plant that produces as many as 1,000 new kernels — all capable of repeating the cycle. The problem is that the "right conditions" are quite broad. Unless you control temperature and moisture, the kernel sits in a state of dynamic equilibrium, slowly using energy to survive or, worse, waking