CORN!
And MORE corn!
The huge combines now humming through Iowa’s expanses (13 million acres) of corn fields remind me that I’m getting old! And nostalgic . . .
Corn picking back in the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up on a Warren County farm, meant using a 1948 John Deere 226 tractor-mounted, two-row picker to pick corn in the ear and run it up the elevator into the trailing wagon.
Before that, my Dad had a “modern,” two-row Oliver picker he pulled behind the A John Deere putt-putt.
Of course, Dad (and Grandpa) also would reminisce about the by-gone days when they picked corn by hand, snapping the ear out of the husk and off the stalk with the help of a husking peg, then tossing the ear into the horse-drawn wagon they walked beside. On a good day, in a good field, a good husker could pick 100 bushels. (A modern combine can harvest more than 7000 bushels per HOUR, if you believe the PR from the manufacturers of the $500,000 behemoths.)
A neighbor has proudly parked his antique Oliver tractor, hitched to a one-row Oliver picker pulling a wagon, beside the road for passers-by to see and admire. Admire? Yes! A desire to climb on and head to the field? Not!
When Dad or other hand-huskers filled their wagons, they probably had to scoop the load off into the corn crib before the day’s work was done.
When mechanical pickers speeded up the process, tractor-driven elevators were needed to run the ears of corn up into wooden, slat-sided corn cribs, or circular wire cribs. The cribs needed open sides so the corn could dry.
If the corn wasn’t all fed to cattle or hogs before the animals were turned out to pasture next spring (no concentrated animal feeding operations – CAFOs), a crew was hired to run the ears through a huge mechanical sheller so the kernels of grain could be marketed. The excess husks got blown into a pile for burning. The left-over mountain of corn cobs often made a dry spot for animals to escape the mud in the cattle lot.
Before genetically engineered BT corn nearly banished corn borers from Iowa, many fields were littered with fallen ears after harvest. Hence the need to turn cattle and hogs into the fields to clean up. That meant fences were required to contain the animals. But livestock in corn fields are rare these days – as are fences to make that possible.
Farming changed with the advent of multi-row, self-propelled combines, which picked and shelled the corn in the field. As farms got bigger, many farmers didn’t have time to wait for the corn to dry on the stalks in the field, or in airy corn cribs. That led to steel storage bins with propane-fueled grain dryers, whose whine was music to farmers in corn country.
Bigger farms and combines meant all the supporting equipment had to be bigger, too. Dad simply added sideboards onto his old wooden wagons to hold more ear corn. But with combine hoppers holding hundreds of bushels of grain, farmers needed monster grain carts to haul the bounty to the bin or to the coop elevator in town.
Better yet, why not buy your own semi-trailer rig, holding thousands of bushels, so you can haul the grain farther and faster? Multiple semis now seem to be the rule, rather than the exception, in many corn fields.
And where is that grain hauled? More than half of Iowa’s 2.5-billion-bushel corn crop is used in producing ethanol in the state’s 42 ethanol plants. (Don’t get me started on THAT issue!)
Ethanol? As a kid, all I knew about ethanol was the irreverent song about ol’ Uncle Will’s still on the hill where he brewed up a gallon or two . . .
Enough nostalgia! Just a few things to ponder if you’re traveling the Iowa countryside during fall harvest.
You also might want to ponder Chris Jones’s musings on corn and industrial agriculture on his substack blog. Here is an example: A Corn Desert
Or check out his book, The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality
https://icecubepress.com/2025/01/13/the-swine-republic-2/
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Good story on the personal processes leading us into the present monocultures of maddness.
I remember, too, our 4-H club doing a corn pickup every fall to raise money for our projects. A farmer would give us a field that had been picked for ears and we girls would walk through it finding missed ears on the ground and throwing them into the wagon he pulled ahead of us. We were “excited “ about the “easy money” we made that day because it usually came with a campfire and hot dog roast when we were done.