Anything Better Than Corn On The Cobb?

Did You Know? - Corn Belt - The area of the United States where corn is a principal cash crop, including Iowa, Indiana, most of Illinois, and parts of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
- The official grain of Wisconsin is corn.
- Nebraska is the 'Cornhusker State.'
- Washington, Missouri, is known as the Corn Cob Pipe Capital of the World

How About Some Trivia?

• An average ear of corn has 800 kernels, arranged in 16 rows.
• There is one piece of silk for each kernel.
• A bushel of corn contains about 27,000 kernels.
• Each tassel on a corn plant releases as many as 5 million grains of pollen.
• Corn is an ingredient in more than 3,500 grocery products.
• One bushel of corn can make 33 pounds of sweetener, 32 pounds of starch, or 2 1/2 gallons of ethanol fuel.
• Corn is the 3rd most important food crop of the world measured by production volume, behind wheat and rice. In terms of acreage planted, it is second only to wheat.

In the 1930s, before the machines were available, a farmer could harvest an average of 100 bushels of corn by hand in a nine-hour day. Today's combines can harvest 900 bushels of corn per hour—or 100 bushels of corn in under 7 minutes!

Did You Know? - The apex of the stem ends in the tassel, an inflorescence of male flowers. When the tassel is mature and conditions are suitably warm and dry, anthers on the tassel dehisce and release pollen. Maize pollen is anemophilous (dispersed by wind), and because of its large settling velocity, most pollen falls within a few meters of the tassel.

Did You Know? - Ears develop above a few of the leaves in the midsection of the plant, between the stem and leaf sheath, elongating by about 3 mm/day, to a length of 18 cm (7 in).

They are female inflorescences, tightly enveloped by several layers of ear leaves commonly called husks. Certain varieties of maize have been bred to produce many additional developed ears. These are the source of the "baby corn" used as a vegetable in Asian cuisine.

Did You Know? - Young ears can be consumed raw, with the cob and silk, but as the plant matures (usually during the summer months), the cob becomes tougher and the silk dries to inedibility. By the end of the growing season, the kernels dry out and become difficult to chew without cooking them tender first in boiling water.

Did You Know? - Before they were domesticated, maize plants only grew small, one-inch long corn cobs, and only one per plant. Many centuries of artificial selection by the indigenous people of the Americas resulted in the development of maize plants capable of growing several cobs per plant that were usually several inches long each.