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Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumTHE BIG HEAT
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/07/23/120723taco_talk_kolbertCorn sex is complicated. As Michael Pollan observes in The Omnivores Dilemma, the whole affair is so freakishly difficult its hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place. Corns female organs are sheathed in a sort of vegetable chastity beltsurrounded by a tough, virtually impenetrable husk. The only way in is by means of a silk thread that each flower extends, Rapunzel-like, through a small opening. For fertilization to take place, a grain of pollen must land on the tip of the silk, then shimmy its way six to eight inches through a microscopic tube, a journey that requires several hours. The result of a successfully completed passage is a single kernel. When everything is going well, the process is repeated something like eight hundred times per ear, or roughly eighty thousand times per bushel.
It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels. But then, in June and July, came broilingly high temperatures, combined with a persistent drought across much of the midsection of the country.
You couldnt choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination, Fred Below, a crop biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg News recently. Its like farming in Hell. Last week, the U.S.D.A. officially cut its yield forecast by twelve per cent, citing a rapid decline in crop conditions since early June and the latest weather data. Also last week, because of the dryness, the U.S.D.A. declared more than a thousand counties in twenty-six states to be natural disaster areas. This was by far the largest such designation the agency has ever made. In the past month, as the severity of the situation has become apparent, corn prices have risen by more than forty per cent. Since so much corn is used to feed livestock, its likely that the increase will translate into higher prices for dairy products and beefalthough, as many have pointed out, beef prices were already rising, owing to last years devastating drought in Texas.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/07/23/120723taco_talk_kolbert#ixzz20mxvOrrB
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THE BIG HEAT (Original Post)
xchrom
Jul 2012
OP
Most soy is produced for dry beans...needs rain for germination, and then 100 days
HereSince1628
Jul 2012
#2
mopinko
(70,125 posts)1. it's just awful out there. i drove from chicago to minnesota last week.
most of the corn i saw was just plain sad. if obama wants the farmer vote, he should send them some disaster aid. plow it under and grow some soy beans while there is still time.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)2. Most soy is produced for dry beans...needs rain for germination, and then 100 days
of favorable weather.
Tough combination to get north of Chicago this time of year.
mopinko
(70,125 posts)3. lettuce, then, radishes, i dunno
but that corn crop is a waste. better it be green manure.
NickB79
(19,253 posts)4. A lot of farmers are chopping it for cattle sileage
Gonna be a lot of full silos by October.