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.