Gleaning A Failed Harvest

Corn, both sweet and field varieties have suffered with the poor start during this extremely wet and cold spring.

Field corn is the stuff grown for feed that looks like sweet corn but with heartier stalks and is usually taller, the ears themselves are edible for humans but it does not taste much better than cardboard. The ears with the husks, stalks and leaves can be ground up and put in huge pits for feeding throughout the winter.

Sweet corn itself comes in many varieties and is grown for people to eat. The cows still like to eat the ears, husks, stalks and leaves of sweet corn if given the chance but usually only get what is left after humans get the good stuff.

One local farmer in the Willamette Valley  had a contract to plant sweet corn on his farm. In the contract he was given specific days in which to plant the corn in early spring and specific days on which to harvest and deliver the crop to the buyer in August. The spring looked bad for many crops including corn which like warm soil to start without too much moisture until the seeds germinate and get established.

This one and many farmers just like him, were able to muck about the field enough to get the seeds planted, but the weather continued to pound cold rain at the young, tender stalks as they germinated and struggled to grow.

The result was fewer than average stalks per acre. Stalks that did manage to grow, had fewer than average ears per stalk. A healthy stalk of sweet corn should have 3 to 4 full ears at maturity, these poor specimens had 1 or 2 at the most and many of them were deformed or not completely filled out. Looking over his crop the farmer and the buyer realized that it would cost more to harvest the field than either could make selling for the contract. The buyer did not want that many inferior ears for processing because that would make their costs go up with poor results and more waste.

Before the farmer knocked the whole planting down and plowed it under, he offered the field for his neighbors and friends to glean what they could.

Just here on the farm, 20 quarts of corn went into the freezer this day. What was a failed crop for one farmer will be shared by family, friend and visitors to our farm throughout the winter and maybe well into next year also.

I will also be posting some new corn recipes this year since I have so much inspiration and corn spit all over my kitchen from cutting the juicy kernels off the cob.