Page 14 2025 Logan County Spring Outlook LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March 2025 SHORT CORN Have you ever taken a Sunday drive on a country road on a warm sunny afternoon in late summer? One can’t help admiring the work of our farmers! Cruising along with the breeze coming through the window and watching the swaying of the tops of the corn rows, it’s almost mesmerizing enough to put you to sleep. You can smell the good old black dirt full of smells of the growing corn. You're just sitting back enjoying the slow ride down the deserted road with your favorite person in peace with the radio faintly playing in the background. Then oops!! You can’t help but notice that someone did something drastically wrong! Why does that field look so different than the others? You recognize the straight sturdy stalks, the long green leaves, and the big growing corn ears on the sides, but it’s just so short! This field looks like something, or someone forgot to do something major because it is just not a normal field of big, tall, straight, strong corn. The old saying ‘knee high, by the fourth of July’ just doesn’t apply to this picture. Surely this is just a misstep, and you think, hopefully, the rest of this farmer's crops are more normal…..or are they? This could be a new hybrid called short-stature corn or short corn. What is short corn or dwarf corn? Although it is, fittingly, more common verbiage to the farmers of the region, it simply means that it is a reduction of the height of the plant. This corn is a little larger than a half-size version of standard commercial corn hybrids. This term has been in the developing stage for more than twenty years. The thought process, which is not refined to date in corn production, is to increase the strength and amount of the kernels on the cob, called the yield. Short-stature corn could provide a lot of physiological and practical advantages, including plant sturdiness, increasing the ability of a corn variety to produce higher yields even when more is planted per acre. This means that it can withstand the competitive stress of crowded growing conditions without a significant reduction in yield compared to older varieties that might struggle under such conditions. More modern corn hybrids are genetically bred to Continued --
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