Corn Update

Moe here. Evening Crop Report.

So, I was crabbing about corn, because that’s my favorite parlor game since I got here. And you know, I’m important enough in the agricultural tradition and industry of Champaign County at this point, that my opinion matters.

Turns out, corn is not just some annoying plants in a field that have been put there on purpose to drive me crazy.

I was thinking about this farmer I met at the market, Russ Roth from Morgan, IL. Here’s Russ:

Mr. Roth his son cultivate 2300 acres of field corn, along with the vegetables and sweetcorn they sold at their market stand. He sold me an Armenian cucumber, something I’d never seen. You have to peel the thing, and then it’s like a regular cucumber on performance-enhancing steroids on the inside:



OK, not to dwell but this thing was huge:



And it tasted like a cross between an American cucumber and a honeydew melon.

Mister Roth shucked a piece of his corn right there and made me try it, raw. Which I did and it was as he promised, the sweetest I’d ever tasted. Then he paid me probably the nicest compliment I've had in a while. He asked me if I was a farm girl. Who ever thought I’d be flattered by that question, but I was.

And Another Thing About Corn

My love affair with corn began for real last weekend at Urbana’s Annual Sweetcorn Festival. These people LOVE their corn. This is a wise strategy for survival, as they are completely surrounded by the stuff, for miles in every direction. Don’t want to make the crops mad at ya and have them close in.

To recap, for those of you that don’t live near a farm, here’s what corn looks like:

And here's what I look like at the Festival, trying to blend in with the scenery:


The Sweet Corn Festival even had corn entertainment, not just corn and corn dogs and funnel cake. Watched a local favorite, a band called Cornmeal which was an amped-up bluegrass deal that favored Grateful Dead-length solos, which were greatly appreciated by their dancing, tie-dyed fans.



Note the pile of Birkenstocks in the foreground, put together for safekeeping, Strength in numbers.



My night at the Corn Festival was finished off with a Led Zepplin tribute band called ZoSo. The band's commitment to replicating Zep was truly something to behold. It was night so the photo's not the greatest but just check out the gauzy shirt and rock and roll hair of a bygone era.















ZoSo is beyond a tribute band and I would place them in the higher category of "re-enacters". Some guys like to pretend they're Ulysess S. Grant in the Civil War and other guys like to pretend they're Robert Plant in the greatest band of all time. They're all living the dream, each in their own way.

State Fair

Did I mention that Illinois is the Land of Lincoln?


So I went to the State Fair and that was also wall-to-wall Lincoln. Here I am, in front of a larger-than-life, young Abe.

The Lincoln theme has started to get on my nerves but I decided to be adult about it and do my best to join in the community spirit of Lincoln pride. Here I am, wearing my best five dollar bill face.



If you look closely, you can see my attempt to replicate Honest Abe’s lazy eye, which the museum in Springfield spent an entire audio-visual show focusing on.

The fair had lots to offer though and I really wish I’d taken the kid there with me one day during the week, so I could’ve seen the poultry prize winners and stuff. I only really had the time to cover dairy and do it any justice.



Here I am as a dairy farmer, trying to look strong and gentle.

There’s plenty of dairy pride too in this state. Have a look at the prize-winning yellow cheese and the prize-winning white cheese.



And the cream of the crop, so to speak of chocolate milk.



That is THE BEST chocolate milk in the state of Illinois you’re looking at.

But words do not describe the butter drama that was being played out in the center of the dairy building. Behold!




Yes, friends, that is a life size cow sculpted out of butter! And if that alone was not impressive enough, the cow is a player in one of nature’s conflicts, immortalized in pure butter. Here you can see the butter cow’s little son facing off with a couple of butter skunks!



Note the detail, and how the butter artist has captured the inquisitive baby bull and the unflappable skunks just as they are about to turn tail and leave their calling card.

Nope, this is just not the kind of thing I would be able to see back home. This is home now, butter cows and corn/soy/corn/soy in every direction and just real nice people. I’m trying to get used to that. It was not my plan to be here, but that’s life, right?

Organ Donors

I decided to go over to the Illinois State employment place and see if they can help me find a side job. Yes, it’s come to that. It’s on “the other side of the tracks” of course. Here’s the tracks, literally.


It was a relief to walk around in a more regular neighborhood. By regular I mean less fancy. But people were sitting on their porches and chatting and said hi to me when I walked by, even though I wasn’t from around there. Nobody goes outside the house where I live with The Child, except to scurry down the driveway to get into the Hummer that’s too big for the garage.

Things looked familiar where I walked and people there don’t have a lot to spare. But it doesn’t mean they’re not generous. Look:




Free for the taking. There’s some joke in there about organ donors, but my tank is empty and I lack joking stamina right now.

Meanwhile, I’m looking into my moonlighting options. Next stop, Kraft Foods on the other other side of the tracks. There's a lot of tracks in Champaign.

Honest Abe

The presence of Abraham Lincoln is very strong in Illinois and he is memorialized everywhere, as you can see from the above USMC Illinois vanity license plate. Abe was The Great Emancipator, as he’s referred to by the people at his museum and library, which is a couple of hours away over in Springfield. The museum is quite a fantastic place with top-rate exhibits that condense giant complex movements in history like slavery and the Civil War into about 17 minutes of action-packed, state of the art audio-visual spectacle. It is a fabulous museum, only they do not allow photography, except in the rotunda.



Here’s the one picture I snapped, waxy Abe and his waxy wife and offspring and perhaps some very real-life descendants of those he freed, eying each other.


You can also go see his house in Springfield, a few blocks away in this historic district that is kept up in pristine Colonial Willamsburg style by the National Park Service.


The house has its own dedicated parking lot
since the park service forbids parking on the street in front of the Lincoln residence.

I guess they’re trying to maintain that Ye Olde Historical feel and that air of authenticity. Oh, but there’s more authenticity: here’s his actual real nameplate that actually bears his name:







Cool, huh? And here’s the whole house:


It’s like living history. I know that sounds dumb but really when I saw the mailbox of Abe Lincoln and looked at the fence that he painted with Tam Sawyer and saw the bus stop bench ad for the souvenir shop that bears his name...




it gave me chills.

As HIgh As An Elephant's Eye

Urbana, IL

So I was riding my bike around town yesterday and the thing is about Urbana and this part of Illinois is that CORN IS KING. If I ride in any direction for long enough I eventually end up in a corn field. Sometimes, I ended up in a field with these other bushy little plants, very cute. Whichever, the fields stretch endlessly in all directions. When I stand looking at the flat of green it is hard to imagine that somewhere the fields end and there is Chicago or Canada or the Rockies. It’s like a giant parking lot, with deep-pile green carpet. Corn. See above.



And the little bushy plants which everyone was quick to tell me are soy. Fascinating! I had never seen actual soybeans outside of a Japanese restaurant so it was slightly thrilling for me. Look, I’m a city girl, what can I say?

I was directed to a part of the campus of the University of Illinois that features prominently in the corn/soy drama of this part of the world.

As you can see from the sign the Morrow Plots are the oldest experimental fields in the USA. Mr. Morrow and a couple of his colleagues figured out here what any Native American who was around at the time of white settlement could have told you: that corn needs to be planted with other stuff so that the soil continues to produce fruitful yields. You know, amber waves of grain and all that.

Morrow and his pals discovered first that oats were helpful in replenishing the soil of its nutrients once corn had been grown and depleted the earth. That is called crop rotation. Nowadays, corn is rotated with soy. Here they are, side by side, soy in front, corn in the back, on the very same plots of earth that Farmer Morrow planted.

Behold Corn! The US grows nearly one half of the crop for the entire world. That’s around 270 million tons, which translates into enough Fritos to go to Saturn and back, placed end to end. OK, the Fritos part is a lie but the tonnage is true, friends.

Behold soy! Happy producer of nitrogen for the soil and everything from printer’s ink to frozen dessert treats for human usage.




Check out the close up people, that’s edamame, fresh on the bush. Aren’t they so cute and fuzzy?

And here I am, among the corn plants, looking scared. But, corn is a gift for which I am grateful. Corn was given to the world by the native people of the Americas. It was first domesticated about 9000 years ago in central Mexico and was called maize in Taino, the language of the indigenous people that whitey came across when he got here. Corn is an old English word that means any grain in general and the rest of the world says maize pretty much. Don’t get me started on the maize mazes. It’s too cornfounding. Har har.