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What Is Corn?

Answer:
Corn is also referred to as maize, and it is a cereal grass that is related to wheat, rice, oats, and barley.

Corn has such a great food value and a wide variety of uses that it has become the most important crop that is grown in the United States and is also one of the most important crops in the world. As far as world production goes, corn ranks second after wheat, and rice is third in the rankings.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, Indians that were living in Mexico first used corn that they gathered from wild plants as a food source. At around 5000 B.C., the Indians learned how to grow their own corn, and that came to be known as Indian corn. Today this term is used to describe corn with multicolor kernels.

In the United States and throughout the developed world, hybrid corn is grown almost exclusively by farmers. Hybrid corn is developed by special breeding techniques in order to develop a crop that will be very tolerant of diseases and pests, as well as to produce high yields. There are varieties of corn that can be farmed in most temperate (mild) and tropical parts of the world. Corn is raised as a source of food and food products for people, livestock feed, and industrial products such as ceramics, explosives, construction materials, metal molds, paints, paper goods, textiles, industrial alcohols, and ethanol.

Each ear of corn averages eight hundred kernels in sixteen rows. A pound of corn will contain roughly 1,300 kernels. Each bushel of corn will have about 72,800 kernels in it. In any given year, a single U.S. farmer will produce enough food and fiber to meet the needs of 129 people. In the United States, corn production is double that of any other crop.