I made a trip to Taylor the other day by myself. My sister-in-law, Noelia, is usually with me whenever I go anywhere outside of Rockdale, but because she and I weren’t talking and laughing on this particular trip I noticed something.
There are fields and fields full of dead corn everywhere. And I remember seeing these same fields full of dead corn in my youth.
Here’s where Rockdale’s farmers will laugh at me.
I kept thinking, “How long are you going to keep trying to grow corn around here. It doesn’t work. Especially if you’re not going to water it. Plant something else for Pete’s sake.”
I posed this question to some friends and got a lot of smart aleck-y answers from people who knew why the corn was dead which I, obviously, did not.
“Their water hose won’t stretch that far.”
“It’s popcorn. They are waiting for it to pop.”
“They use the leaves to make tamale wrappers.”
And my personal favorite from Michael Bailey:
“It’s where the children live.”
Surely I am not the only non-farmer in Rockdale so I will share with you what I learned in case you’ve been wondering why there’s so much dead corn everywhere you look right now.
They purposely grow it and let it die without water. Who knew?
It’s used to make feed for livestock. And my favorite school counselor—and farmer evidently—from my youth, Cathy Ormsby, said there is a lot of science behind it.
The corn gets lots of rain in the spring to start its growth. Then it gets almost no rain in the hot summer heat and it dies. The farmers have to wait until exactly the right moment to harvest it because if there is too much moisture in the kernels they won’t get a good price for it at the market.
There is only neglect involved when I kill a house-plant, but there is science involved in growing dead corn.
Again, who knew?
My friend Robin Heintze who is both a teacher’s aide and a farmer (she grows cows) told me the dead corn is used for livestock feed, bird seed and deer corn.
And if you think about it, what a good idea that is if you raise cattle. Devoting part of your land to growing feed for your own animals makes good economic sense.
Texas is one of the states with the least amount of corn grown. Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska are the top three. Kansas is only number seven and I thought that’s all they grew in that state. Those states are where most of the grocery store corn comes from which I had no clue about. I figured some farmer in Texas grew the corn I buy at Brookshire’s. Nope.
Corn is also used in making penicillin. It makes industrial strength glue stronger.
If you get a urinary tract infection you can brew a tea made from corn silk and it’ll go away.
It occurs to me that this is the second time I’ve written about corn lately. I’ll bet Mom and Lee Lee Parsley will like this one better.
I’d should stop now before I start to sound corny.
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