Friday, July 16, 2010

Farmer Fridays - Corn, corn, and more corn


My house is surrounded by corn and even more corn.

  
It actually makes a very nice natural privacy fence.


Anyway, what you may not know is what type of corn it is that is grown in the fields around my house and on our family farm.

There are several types of corn.  There are 5 main types of corn that are used in food production:  dent, sweet, pop, flint, and flour.  Check out Versagrain for a basic, yet good explanation of these 5 types of corn. 

On our family farm we grow dent corn, which we call field corn, and  sweet corn.

Each year, we grow about 700 acres of yellow field corn.  100% of the corn we grow is used to feed our pigs throughout the year.
 
We also grow a small amount of sweet corn on our family farm for us to enjoy in the summer months as nothing says summer quite like sweet corn.  Because we love our sweet corn, my husband and father-in-law plant our sweet corn on the edge of one of our field corn fields with our field corn planter.

 
This really makes planting the sweet corn relatively easy, but every once in awhile there will be a renegade field corn seed in the planter which will result in a field corn stalk in the middle of the sweet corn field. 


And although we don't grow any, we consume a fair amount of popcorn at this pig pen.  

Thanks for tuning into this week's Farmer Fridays


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8 comments:

  1. Nice job of explaining what we do and the different ways we do it! We grow about 1000 acres of corn, some goes into silos to feed our cattle, and the rest eventually makes it to the elevator via our bins and trucks. The other 1000 acres is soybeans and a little wheat. Froze 25 quarts of sweetcorn between storms! That was the last of it for this year.

    Lana
    www.walkingtheoff-beatenpath.blogspot.com

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  2. We are also loving the sweet corn this year. We have soybeans on one side of the house this year, so not as good of privacy fence:(

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  3. Heather ~ I just love your Farmer Friday posts! Sweet corn is our favorite! I am going to give raising corn a try next year in our small family garden. One of our favorite fall activities is to head out to the various corn maizes on local farms - so much fun!

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  4. Just letting you know I blogged about ethanol and linked to your post today. I liked how you went into more detail about the differences in corn.

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  5. So, you don't sell any of your corn to the coop or anything? Do you have your own feed mill? How does that all work?

    Do you ever have to buy more?

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  6. I can't wait for our sweet corn to be ready :)My BIL does it just like you guys... on the edge of his field corn.

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  7. Yum, sweet corn! 700 acres of feed corn?! That's a LOT of corn! Boggles the mind.

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  8. Love the pic of the "renegade" field corn in the midst of the sweet corn. lol! :)

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