WYOMING, Iowa -- Taking a late-summer country drive in the Midwest means venturing into the corn zone, snaking between 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out nearly everything other than the sun and an occasional water tower.The skyscraper-like corn is a part of rural America as much as cavernous red barns and placid cows.But soon, that towering corn might become a miniature of its former self, replaced by stalks only half as tall as the green giants that have dominated fields for so long.“As you drive across the Midwest, maybe in the next seven, eight, 10 years, you're going to see a lot of this out there,” said Cameron Sorgenfrey, an eastern Iowa farmer who has been growing newly developed short corn for several years, sometimes prompting puzzled looks from neighboring farmers.“I think this is going to change agriculture in the Midwest."The short corn developed by Bayer Crop Science is being tested on about 30,000 acres (12,141 hectares) in the Midwest with the promise of offering farmers a variety that can withstand powerful windstorms that could become more frequent due to climate change.
The corn's smaller stature and sturdier base enable it to withstand winds of up to 50 mph — researchers hover over fields with a helicopter to see how the plants handle the wind.The smaller plants also let farmers plant at greater density, so they can grow more corn on the same amount of land, increasing their profits.That is especially helpful as farmers have endured several years of low prices that are forecast to continue.The smaller stalks could also lead to less water use at a time of growing drought concerns.U.S.
farmers grow corn on about 90 million acres (36 million hectares) each year, usually making it the nation's largest crop, so it's hard to overstate the importance of a potential large-scale shift to smaller-stature corn, said Dior Kelley, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who is researching different paths for growing short...