While the 1,500 miles of America’s corn belt might mislead you into thinking corn is a wild crop, it was actually created roughly 9,000 years ago through selective breeding of a Mexican grass called teosinte.
Geneticists have determined that farmers who likely lived in what is now Mexico’s tropical Central Balsas River Valley must have seen food potential in the thin, extremely hard teosinte in their area, which would have only had a handful of kernels on their tiny cobs.
Despite living in small societies and traveling with the seasons, the indigenous farmers managed over thousands of years to breed a variant that did not pack its kernels in hard cases…. The final result is a crop that not only does not exist in the wild, but could not exist in the wild.
Related on the SLP
Because the corn industry receives more government subsidies than any other crop (including $90 billion between 1995 and 2010), it is extremely expensive to taxpayers. It is also wasteful, in many ways, to grow corn at the quantities that we do; a more diverse use of the land, water, soil and fertilizer that goes into maintaining massive corn farms could yield more nutritional bang for our buck.
