DES MOINES, Iowa — With harvest season for Iowa's corn farmers in full swing, the tall walls of green corn fields are a familiar sight, but the future of corn may actually prove to be "short."
Researchers at Corteva Agriscience, an American based global agri-science company with employees in Iowa, have spent several years analyzing "reduced stature corn." It's about half the size of normal corn crops, which can be up to 12 feet tall.
They've found that the product has the potential to increase yield for farmers, as there is less risk of corn falling or stalk lodging. That would make room for more crops to be planted per acre.
"We do a lot of robust testing on both how this product performs in normal growers operation, how does it yield? How are the agronomics, but also, how does it stand up to wind and other weather?," said VP of Biotechnology Wendy Srnic.
Snric said the hybrid could also lengthen the harvest window for farmers by allowing for earlier "cover crop seeding."
"The system that we're looking at in Corteva ... they're just kind of shrunk down, so there's an equal sort of shrinkage of all of the inner nodes," Snric told Local 5. "That makes the harvesting actually very favorable."
Corteva has identified few disadvantages of reduced stature corn, but their system is still in the research phase.
When asked about the future of corn in Iowa, Snric said the growers will get to decide.
"There's so many benefits to the system, but it's new for growers," she told Local 5. "If there's value in this system, I think we're prepared to enter that that market strongly, with the very solid product lineup that will serve that market as we have for certainly Iowa customers over the last 100 years."
Short corn developed by Bayer Crop Science is being tested on about 30,000 acres in the Midwest, the Associated Press reports.
U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows Corteva and Bayer provided more than half the U.S. retail seed sales of corn between 2018 and 2020.