IS THE CORN INVINCIBLE YET?
Zea mays or maize or corn, as we call it in the United States, has established itself as an integral part in US economy.
The versatility of this cash crop to respond positively to human needs and investments has made its journey to this modern age possible. How we use corn today holds both sides of the bargain for analysts from various walks of life. However, it appears that this cash crop has great potential and its uses very futuristic.
According to many researches, the modern day maize is the result of domestication of grass called teosinte, which began some more than 10,000 years ago. Scientists have discovered much evidence of this process in various parts of the world, including the Guila Naquitz cave in the Oaxaca valley of Mexico. The corn cobs discovered here dates back to 3400BC. Many scientists since George Beadle in 1930, have done cross breeding to prove that the teosinte is the ancestor of modern day maize, although they do not look alike. Figure 1. Today scientists have used cutting edge technology to prove the association between these two plants.
Figure 1
Source:
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/
Maize is a highly productive crop and it is grown almost everywhere in the US. According to USDA, corn is cultivated in 90 million acres of land and most of them are around Midwest and the Great Plains. Figure 2. The versatility of maize has enabled scientists to produced staggering array of products. Starch, corn meal, penicillin, sugar, whisky, ethanol, corn silk, corn cobs, oil, glue, bio-degradable plastic, high fructose corn syrup, to name a few using wet and dry milling processes.
18 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | January/February 2018
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