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The Rise Of The Corn Empire
A Three-Part Series
Hey Guys! It’s the Black Bean, here with the first-ever blog post! Welcome to the club, where we explore food sustainability and how you can stay healthy.
– Beans
Origins
Who would have predicted that a tall plant with a single row of small, grape-like seeds would come to dominate a quarter of the shelves in your local supermarket and evolve into the corn we know today? This plant is called Wild Teosinte, and its transformation from obscurity to prominence is more remarkable than it might seem.
Our story begins long before the existence of modern-day populations, around 400,000 years ago. Wild Teosinte grew in North America, with its seeds ready to be spread by surrounding animals. The problem, however, was that its reliance on these animals was neither reliable nor productive. As a result, this humble plant struggled to thrive on its own.
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So, how did it evolve into the juicy, sweet, golden corn we know and love today? Believe it or not, humans played a key role in the evolution of corn. By spreading these seeds much more efficiently than animals could, humans allowed Wild Teosinte to thrive. Over time, Wild Teosinte became increasingly dependent on humans for its survival and growth. Essentially, Wild Teosinte became dependent on humans to thrive. That’s what makes this story so surprising.
Corn Breeding
Fast forward 391,000 years and Mexicans successfully bred corn using artificial selection. This ancient technique allowed indigenous people to cultivate desired traits, such as the sweet, juicy corn we know and love today. While the Mexicans may not have fully understood the mechanisms of corn breeding—since Mendel didn’t discover artificial and natural selection until much later—they still achieved remarkable results.
Moving beyond artificial selection, evolution continued through scientific studies. In 1906, a geneticist from Cold Spring Harbor, New York, named G.H. Shull conducted experiments on corn inheritance. He observed a relationship between the decrease in inbreeding (the production of offspring between similar organisms) and the increase in crossing (the production of offspring between less related organisms) when strands of maize (the same thing as corn) were bred. The resulting stalk of corn? A stalk of maize that yields results 10 times out of 10 because it has been bred from top to bottom!
Unlike the Mexicans, who were not only selecting corn but also discarding the rest, we are now breeding them. We call this corn “hybrid” corn. However, not everything was as simple as it seemed. For example, hybrid corn must be bought by farmers every year. Though hybrid corn produces higher yields in the first year, breeding hybrid corn during the off-season will decrease the number of bushels per acre (a bushel is 56 pounds of corn). This means that to remain competitive, farmers must purchase corn each year. Additionally, annually purchasing this corn ensures that seed companies will consistently profit, even though some farmers may face low yields.
Another way hybrid corn is costing us is by polluting the earth and fatiguing soil. Traditionally, farmers rotate crops each year to avoid soil fatigue. To put this into perspective, a farmer might alternate between planting corn and soybeans. Conversely, hybrid corn is grown on the same field for consecutive seasons in order to compete with other farmers. So how do they avoid soil fatigue? By dumping a heaping pile of nitrogen to replenish the soil’s nutrients. Nevertheless, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That reaction was recycling all those chemicals into acid rain, polluting the earth again. Overall, our way of producing corn has damaged our ecosystem and left our fields dry.
Corn as a species has grown exponentially in terms of population, but the way that it’s produced has had an impact on how the food system operates. We’ve seen huge economic and environmental impacts that are quite frankly pretty unsustainable. We started out by helping corn grow as a plant, one seed at a time, but now we’re adding all these chemicals to it. The unsustainability of it all could very well change what we eat. That other way of eating? Well, that other way is for another post (Hint: it’s not veganism).
Have A Nice Day! – Beans
