Corn farming aims to improve crops genetically and environmentally for disease and pest resistance, productivity, and weather tolerance. Corn is used for human consumption, livestock feed, and commercial purposes. Selective breeding and genetic engineering are used to create strong and resistant strains. Corn is important for human and animal diets, and efforts are made to secure the world’s supply. The US, Mexico, and Canada produce about half of the world’s corn supply. The ultimate goal is to prevent crop damage caused by fungus and mycotoxins.
Corn farming is an attempt to genetically and environmentally improve corn crops so that they are more resistant to disease and pests, more productive, and more tolerant of adverse weather conditions. Corn is a type of grain produced for human consumption in many forms and as a source of oil. In the United States, corn is more commonly referred to as sweet corn, Indian corn, or simply corn, and these terms specify the varieties grown for the human diet. Other varieties of corn are also grown to feed livestock and for other commercial purposes such as the production of high fructose corn syrup as a sugar substitute or as an ethanol fuel.
There are many different varieties of corn, so corn farming is an industry-specific process that depends on the goal of the breeding program. Strains are often subdivided according to the level of starch each has, with high-starch varieties bred for popcorn, such as Zea mays var. everta and lower starch varieties ground into cornmeal for baked goods such as Zea mays var. starches. Programs of selective maize breeding of hybrids and genetic engineering of the species to produce strong and resistant strains are actively underway in many locations in Europe, the UK and the USA.
Plant breeding is an international concern for cereal crops such as maize. This is because grains are such an important component of the daily human and animal diet, and corn farming is an attempt to secure the world’s supply as diseases and pests adapt or climate change adversely affects its growth. Two other major areas of interest in corn farming include drought tolerance and nitrogen resistance due to the increasing use of concentrated nitrogen fertilizers. These efforts have resulted in world production of maize surpassing all other grains, with projected levels as of 2011 of 858,000,000 tons compared to 666,000,000 tons of wheat produced and 448,000,000 tons of rice.
Maize crops are considered so important that the entire genome of the plant was mapped in 2008 by three US agencies, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), who have a stake in ensuring the protection of corn crops. This genetic map of 32,540 genes has been made publicly available online for international research. The ultimate goal of understanding corn genetics is to find a way to prevent crop damage such as that caused by the fungus Fusarium verticilliodes, which causes corn kernels to rot. The fungi produce fumonism, a mycotoxin so potentially harmful to humans and animals that similar fungal compounds have been implicated in yellow rain, where they are suspected to have been used as weapons of warfare in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.
The United States and other North American countries of Mexico and Canada rely heavily on corn as a primary grain crop, so corn farming receives a lot of attention. This region of the world produces about half of the world’s corn supply. However, most of this production is not intended for the human food supply. In the United States, 333,000,000 tons of corn were grown in 2009. The United States exports about 24% of its total cereal production, while 6% is destined for direct human consumption, 32% for industrial use and 29% for livestock feed. The remaining 74,700,000 tons of US grain surpluses in 2010 were held in reserve.
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