it's America's iconic crop it grows bigger and faster than any other grain in the world without it the Aztecs the pilgrims in the state of Iowa might not exist and maybe we wouldn't either there's so much you didn't know about corn it will blow your mind so let's find out how this crop works corn is the single most productive crop on the planet nothing I mean nothing grows as well as corn you can't get the biomass the yield of any other grain or vegetable product compared with corn this ordinary seeming plant can be turned into everything from plastics to gasoline it's a brilliant plant and its adaptability it's used so profusely and so many products in so many ways I'm not sure we could live in your longer if we lost corn and corn is us up to 70% of the carbon in our bodies come from the single incredible plant but the kind of corn that makes up most of the US harvest has a bizarre secret one that will shock you 99% of the US corn crop is a type called dent corn named for the little dent in each kernel so why is this one type so dominant because no other food crop on earth produces so much so fast we are now up to close to 200 bushels of corn per acre it's an amazing amount of food 5 tons of food from one acre of land it's an incredible achievement it's true but even though it's the biggest crop in the country and maybe the world rod dent corn is pretty much impossible for humans to eat they're growing in edible crops in a certain sense I mean they've got to be processed first that's because the outer shell is too hard for our bodies to digest in fact to make dent corn edible it either has to be ground into flour or soaked in a highly corrosive alkaline substance called lye the same chemical used to tan leather but corn still makes up a huge percentage of all the calories we consume dent corn finds its way into everything from chips to ice cream to toothpaste we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for corn now corn is a law flan to keep up with the world's demand for corn American farmers grew a staggering 93 point six million acres last year that's more than enough cornfields to cover every square inch of Iowa and Illinois combined and every kernel from every ear of every stock is loaded with corn secret ingredient a complex energy-packed molecule called starch corn is made up of three key components the germ pericarp and endosperm one part contains the living genetic material the plants where the DNA is that's what allows it to grow then around that is really a bunch of energy which we would call starch it's actually a solar power cell that turns the energy from the Sun and takes in co2 and turns it all into food or chemical energies it really is just this this packet of carbohydrate pound-for-pound carbohydrates contain more energy than dynamite extracting that energy is the trick animal cells like ours do it by transforming the starch into a sugar called glucose the main fuel source for every cell in our bodies glucose is sort of the building block of all life but corn hasn't always provided us such an amazing source of energy it's had to evolve everyone knows what corn looks like as tall as a grown man bright green giant juicy cobs covered in golden kernels and we all know where corn grows to the Midwest well it turns out neither one is really true in fact to find real corn you need to go to central Mexico the ancestor of corn is this little branched grass and in Mexico called teosinte that's right corn isn't a vegetable it's a grass and the cobs of that original plan are just slightly larger than a quarter certainly not big enough for a meal so how did this stubby little Central American grass turn into the giant green monster that crowds the fields of Iowa people this is a product of 10,000 years of domestication and now breeding to get this plant which is tall and produces these large ears of seeds the man-made work of improving corn is still going on at Iowa State University Ames Iowa and the pressure is on corn producers want to increase yields by six percent every five years luckily corn is ready-made for selective breeding it's a perfect plan it's got both male and female flowers and so it's the easiest plan to manipulate we can take the pollen from another corn plant and mix it with the female parts and essentially take the best traits from two plants one parent grows well in tight rows the other produces large ears crossbreed them and you might get a hybrid capable of generating more corn per acre right now yields are going up in Iowa about the rate of about two bushels per acre per year getting the corn plants to crossbreed may be easy but finding a breakthrough hybrid requires a lot of trial and error like creating a new drug breeding new corn varieties can take years of work and cost a fortune the hybrid seeds that a farmer plants has millions of dollars of research behind it and our symbiotic relationship with corn doesn't end in the breeding lab getting the man-made corn to grow isn't just a matter of scattering some seeds and hoping for the best you pay for every one you won't plant every one just getting the seeds in the ground is a roll of the dice there's a little saying you don't have to go to Vegas to gamble you can do it becoming a farmer we have normally a narrow window due to weather concerns to get our crop planted but it's not just the seeds themselves that are carefully designed by man it's also how they're planted in the wild seeds are dispersed by winds or animals on a corn farm they're dispersed by high-tech equipment each one of these diesel-powered beasts PO planners some 60 feet wide and capable of spitting out 32,000 seeds per acre if you calculate that that comes out to about one seed every six inches I'm checking my spacing right now apparently we very close to six because every inch matters some farmers even employ satellites 12,000 miles above the fields to guide their machines by using GPS to plant and then coming back to do all the subsequent tillage and maintenance operations were able to follow the same track and we never damage the crop but to really blast off core needs a turbocharger in this case nitrogen-rich fertilizer nitrogen powers the creation of basic building blocks amino acids and cell membranes but the soil alone can't supply enough of it so farmers use fertilizer to increase their yields it takes an immense amount of fertilizer like between 100 and 200 pounds an acre because corn is are a greedy plant the process of making all that fertilizer causes two problems it consumes fossil fuel and creates pollution we use a chemical nitrogen that is derived from natural gas from fossil fuel and the corn only absorbs some of it and the rest of it runs out into the water supply nitrogen fertilizer washes from the cornfields of the Midwest into the Mississippi River and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico there it's blamed for depleting the water of oxygen and killing marine life but when applied to a field of corn the nitrogen supercharges the plants finely tuned genetic machinery and it goes to work once the chute breaks ground the first thing that it does it starts producing leaves that plant keeps growing taller and keeps producing more leaves 21 weeks later the corn will stand six feet tall and every acre will pack enough energy to feed 1687 people dinner so it seems that the experiment begun more than ten thousand years ago has definitely been a success and given us our most productive man-made crop hardrock oil-drilling one of the toughest jobs around there's a lot of moving parts this change there's pite there's a lot of things moving around so you know you have to know what you're doing so what does this brutal job have to do with the juicy ear of corn it's all about a secret ingredient called drilling fluids extremely important bought a drilling operation you couldn't drill the well if you didn't have the drilling fluids and you can't have the drilling fluids without corn that's because corn is the basic engine behind a vital ingredient for oil drilling called xanthan gum it helps crews make strikes and even stay alive but just how does corn do all that with a little help from a bacteria called xanthan omus in the wild the xanthan omus bacteria causes broccoli and cabbage to rot but in the 1950s a USDA chemist made the unlikely discovery that mixing the bacteria with the sugar derived from corn created an incredibly useful biopolymer called xanthan gum xanthan gum loves water so whenever it comes in contact with water it immediately wants to hold that and take care of it basically it turns ordinary water into a kind of slime slippery but viscous and that's what makes it so useful for so many products in short it's a naturally occurring thickener xanthan gum is born in Okmulgee Oklahoma and it all begins with corn or corn syrup the syrup is a kind of liquid cornstarch sweet viscous and loaded with energy it's used in sodas and syrup and sweeteners and it's the ideal food for xanthine illness @cp calicoes 95 acre facility fully loaded 100 ton rail cars pull into the yard every week each sealed car contains 20,000 gallons of corn syrup takes about six hours from the pumping session to hump it over into a holding tank from there chemists inside the plant slab inoculate the corn syrup with the xanthan omus bacteria and start to mix the agitator is like a big shaker table the agitation causes friction the bacteria does grow in this sugary environment bacteria replicates fast one bacterium cell can spawn a hundred trillion identical cells in just 48 hours from a little tiny tiny amount of stuff and turns into 40,000 gallons after a few days the bacteria has consumed the carbohydrates in the corn and excreted a gooey residue xanthan gum ideal for a variety of commercial uses xanthan gum Jews where they want to have a uniform suspension it goes into applications where water needs to be controlled so that when your toothpaste is squeezed out it doesn't run out of the tube but it's actually squeezed out on to your toothbrush but what is it about this corn powered slime that's so vital to hard rock oil drilling it turns out that xanthan gum has a unique ability to lubricate and suspend rugged materials deep underground properties that are key to the Roughnecks working the drill if you can imagine when you're trying to drill an original hole there are a lot of particulates a lot of rocks a lot of dirt things that we don't want to have included in the end product being oil the benefit of the xanthan gum is it allows it to suspend the particles as you're drilling that hole to clean out the hole so that you get a uniformity drilling zone keeping a whole uniform doesn't just make drilling easier it helps prevent deadly accidents called blowouts you're punching a hole into an area that's gonna come out it's like punching a hole in a balloon but it's in the ground so the pressures squeezed out that comes out this hole so any little spark it'll ignite and catch on fire but by keeping debris from falling back down the hole and sealing the shaft from the outside air xanthan gum makes it possible to drill safely in dangerous environments well without it I don't think that we would be able to make it to work it sums it up for me the u.s. corn harvest is the Superbowl of farming the sheer scale of it is staggering corn farmers can be as large as 2,000 acres or bigger and so that's about the size of 20 vatican cities but it's not just the size at stake with every harvest are billions of dollars and potentially millions of lives the challenge to pick the more than 68 million acres of the US debt corn crop so how do farmers do it not by hand that's for sure instead they call in their secret weapon a monster machine called a combine during the harvest season what time is limited we need to get our crops off in a hurry it takes around 120 to 200 man-hours to harvest one hectare of field corn by hand whereas a combine can perform an equivalent amount of work anywhere from a half to just over an hour a top-of-the-line model like this can cost as much as $400,000 it can also cut shucks and show more than 200 acres a day oh that's a six-cylinder John Deere diesel and it's like 120 horsepower it's got a turbocharger on it the engine house an entire farms profits rest on the combines ability to perform in the tool taking the biggest bite is called the header the quarry comes in four rows at a time through the head picked up by the gathering chains and then the snapping rolls snapped the ear of corn off the stalk but the combine doesn't just cut the ears it's powerful machinery can turn a stock of corn into a blast of golden kernels in seconds the ears slam into a rotating drum that shakes the kernels from the cob an auger then lifts the loose kernels into a hopper for shipping every truckload is gold with corn prices at record highs each acre harvested can be worth a thousand dollars plastic is everywhere people do not realize that we are living in a plastic society where everything is done from plastic from the fabrics of our clothing to our glasses to our watches to the cars that we're driving most plastic today is oil-based not only does it use 10% of our oil supply it increases global warming and can take more than 1,000 years to degrade plastics are everywhere they're in landfills they're in the ocean they're floating around but corn can change all that plastic made from corn is different it's biodegradable carbon neutral renewable and even edible you're growing molecules out there and we can arrange those molecules to be food or the plastic bag that the food comes in at a time we're starting to talk about very seriously about global warming greenhouse gases I believe that bioplastic are the great answer to the questions that we currently have but how do you turn a kernel of corn into a clear sheet of plastic wrap you've got to get down to the starch what we want to do in wet corn milling is take these kernels apart into their components starch protein fiber steeping kernels in sulfur dioxide and water at more than 100 degrees loosens bonds within the kernel after two days the kernels are ready to be ground we do it just right the germ will pop out and will start to float and it floats because it has vegetable oil in it next the mixture is sent refused to pull the corn oil away from the starch what's left is almost pure starch the long chains of carbon molecules in the corn starch are remarkably similar to the chains of carbon in oil based plastics turning them into a plastic just takes a few secret ingredients some citric acids and some mixing and bingo you've got a long-chain polymer the building block for plastic six weeks ago this was caught on a cob all of a sudden it's a plastic now these pellets of corn polymer can be melted and formed into all kinds of biodegradable plastic products what used to be a corn brain is now a fork and that's pretty incredible before advanced high-yielding hybrids farmers all over the country grew many types of corn it was less efficient but safer because even if one type of corn was attacked by disease or pests other types were resistant and would survive but now to maximize yield u.s. growers rely on just a few strains we don't have as many farmers growing this diversity in these various areas of the world anymore that means the entire crop is especially vulnerable because it's genetically identical a single pasture pathogen could exploit a genetic weakness and ravage the harvest threatening the world supply if it's very Len enough and the crop is uniform enough it could wipe out a crop in a year this could lead millions of people around the world to starvation but there is a defense the insects and crop genetics research unit in Ames Iowa this federal facility stores more than twenty thousand different varieties of corn seed each kernel offers a reservoir of genetic diversity designed to help scientists and breeders save crops from biological disaster we're trying to make sure that genes that evolved over the course of the evolution of that material aren't lost they might be useful in the future to fight some disease that might come on some insect when a pasture disease attacks researchers go to the vault they look for a variety that long ago evolved a resistance to a specific pathogen and then breed that resistance into a current crop we can actually go back to the seed banks pull out the old varieties look for ones that are resistant to whatever problems that we're having at the time and so it basically saves our food stuff as corns enemies mutate in advance the role played by these seat banks becomes increasingly critical they aren't just preserving corns past they're also protecting its future and ours the River Valley co-op into wit Iowa home to one of the world's largest piles of corn yeah it just a lot of corn when this file is full ahead just short of a million bushels in it this storage facility holds enough corn to provide more than 25 million people enough calories to live for a day just one of these steel bins can hold an incredible 5 square miles of corn but there's so much corn grown each year that even these giant bins are quickly filled we market this grain all year long we're loading into trucks and transporting either to an ethanol plant or to a river terminal and loading it on a river barge to be transported either to a different part of this country or around the world corn storage may seem safe even dull but it's not every bin in silo can literally become a powder keg all it takes is a little bit of grain dust grain dust highly explosive when new loads pour into the bins this kicks up dust a mix of corn starch and corn oil that's combustible when suspended in air with its high carbon content the starch is extremely flammable and the oil can accelerate the blaze even more it's more explosive than dynamite if you have the right concentration of grain dust in the air plus a spark we have video just into our newsroom firefighters from at least five area departments were on the scene trying to douse the flames over its twenty one week growing cycle the u.s. dent corn crop converts sunshine water and co2 in the air into more than four hundred and twelve billion pounds of starch starch is what fuels the conversion of corn into an incredible source of power it's really all about starch but in Tennessee whiskey America's unique contribution to alcoholic beverages this starch is more than just the source of energy it's what makes Tennessee whiskey Tennessee whiskey Court is very important we buy roughly about six million bushels of grain father it's gonna be cool so it's it's keen here at Jack Daniels in Lynchburg Tennessee they only use number one yellow corn a type of dent corn it's considered a very nice healthy kernel that stores well that has a high starch content of course the trick to turning those millions of kernels into gallons of whiskey is to free the starch to do that the corn flows into a mill where a series of metal bars called hammers crush the pericarp it'll fall into the hammer mill and these hammers will then basically explode the grain against these these screens the corn is then sifted and blown into with ten thousand gallon mash cooker they're the crushed corn starch is mixed with other grains and Jack Daniels secret ingredient iron free cave water that's good because iron inhibits fermentation next the corn and cave water soup is cooked at 220 degrees turning the corn starch into concentrated sugars it helps to soluble eyes those starches get them into the cave water get them onto some a format that the yeast can actually go and attack and convert to alcohol and this is the key sugars in corn are the perfect food not just for people but for a very specialized creature yeast yeast is a single-celled fungus and yeast is able to in the absence of oxygen break sugar down into ethanol carbon dioxide inside these 40,000 gallon fermentation tanks the corn undergoes a complete transformation billions of tiny yeast cells devour the solar energy stored in the kernel as starch this mixture is slowly boiled or distilled to remove the water and create 140 proof or 70% corn alcohol alcohol boils off at a lower temperature than the water so it turns into a gas and then you can later collect it through a condensing column with water running through it and it drips down and becomes alcohol this clear flammable liquid is then filtered to remove impurities next it gains its color by aging in an oak barrel where corn alcohol finally becomes genuine Tennessee whiskey there are lots of kinds of corn but none is as fun or packs the high-pressure wallop of popcorn how does it do it it's all about the shell what makes popcorn unique from the other types of corn is the hard outer shell it has to be strong and has to be airtight this sealed shell is the key to popcorns amazing power it has to be able to hold back the pressure inside the kernel until the temperature reaches at least 450 degrees Fahrenheit that's when steam in the endosperm gelatin eise's the starch and presses out against the pericarp once the kernel starts to go past 450 degrees it redlines the pressure within each kernel can be as much as 135 pounds per square inch to put that in perspective most car tires can hold about 90 pounds of pressure before exploding there is so much pressure exerted from the expanding moisture against that outer shell that literally the corn turns inside out and the white fluffy part of popcorn is is starch but tapping that power means getting just the right kernels and avoiding the duds which is what they do at jolly time popcorn in Sioux City Iowa every day the company trucks in 160 million kernels per load so what does it take to make the perfect kernel for popping the answer is a thick rounded shell with the right amount of moisture inside it pops best at 13 and a half percent moisture so our first job as a processor is to dry that corn to the proper moisture content getting the moisture level right is the easy part moisture determines the kernels weight the kernels too dry to pop are shaken out by a specialized device we call the gravity machine and a lighter kernel is probably light because it's lost its moisture and therefore won't pop well so we eliminate that as well the hard part is making sure the kernel itself isn't damaged but how do you do that on a line where more than 750,000 of the tiny kernels raced by every minute that's too fast for the human eye to catch defects so the popcorn is zapped with all-seeing ultraviolet light if the light sees a discolored kernel then a shot of air will blow it off the line and eliminate it those that pass inspection fire into bags at a rate of 950 kernels every second 200,000 pounds a day and nearly a million pounds a week travel from jolly times corncrib to popcorn bowls around the world at each of them is a tiny steam-powered bomb just perfect for munching Americans might eat a lot of popcorn about 54 gallons per family per year but we use a lot more gas in fact we use about a hundred and forty six billion gallons of gas every year but did you know that about 6 billion of those gallons don't come from underground instead they come from this corn and this verasun plant in Charles City Iowa is a big part of that equation turning hard kernels of corn into a clear flammable fuel take some doing though first you need a lot of corn today we're going to get about 320 truckloads you're almost a little over 300,000 foot then the corn is crushed steeped and pumped into 800,000 gallon tanks there it meets a special yeast one that loves nothing better than eating the starts in the corn and transforming it the fuel ethanol industry could take an equivalent amount of grains and starch and convert it within say 50 to 70 hours we always try to maximize that to get as much as we can from that corn so we don't waste any of the start every day the refinery turns bushels of plain old dent corn into 200 proof 100% corn alcohol basically it's moonshine I mean really that's that's ultimately what we're making here but you really wouldn't want it drinking of course 100% pure ethanol packs a lot of energy enough for Henry Ford to run his first car on the stuff ethanol fast burning flame is almost invisible to the naked eye a single stray spark could cause a conflagration your alarm starts going off you have to shut everything down to avoid accidental combustion cellphones are forbidden inside the facility because they can spark and ignite fumes and all employees were specially designed cotton jumpsuits that won't melt to their skin in the event of a fire but despite the dangers day in and day out this facility produces 300 thousand gallons of pure ethanol fuel and the demand continues to grow it's growing and new and there's always new technologies just on the horizon and we're going to continue to capitalize on those new opportunities even as ethanol plants spring up across the Midwest questions still remain is it efficient to make fuel from corn is it really a way to energy independence and at what cost corn has these incredible uncounted prices the fertilizer being you know probably the most important all that it takes an immense amount of fertilizer that is derived from natural gas from fossil fuel and that's not counting the gas to harvest and transport the corn or manufacture the ethanol so what it means is that it takes a lot of gas to turn corn into gas but one amazing difference between ethanol and gasoline is that when you burn ethanol you get water that's right when ethanol combines with oxygen in your engine it makes water the temperature sits at more than 90 degrees with humidity to match it's the beginning of a sweet corn harvest farmers wait for the right moment when it's ready you've got the chopping then start cutting the timing is real crucial here when you have to work you have to go Lexington South Carolina the farmers here face a unique challenge at harvest time one that comes from corns remarkable diversity corn is the most versatile commodity that we have in agriculture they're actually better raw than they are cooked sweet corn sub mutant that occurred thousands of years ago in the evolution of corn when that was being domesticated and it retains juicy sweet nature but this unique trait makes harvesting sweet corn a perilous task timing is everything one day too long on the stock and the sugar decays losing its sweetness you leave them on there too long they actually turn to starch to stop the clock workers must harvest the crop in just hours on average a team can clear 10 acres and package more than two hundred and eight thousand ears per day but it's not just about harvesting quickly to keep that corn sweet and tasty you need some emergency measures ice which is why every 30 minutes the truck returns with loads of corn found for the ultimate in cooldowns the hydro cooler once you cut it you got it you have to take the fill temperature out of it if you don't cool down just continue to heat up the summer Sun that helped the corn grow is now its enemy heat speeds up the breakdown of the sugar so chilling sweet corn from 50 degrees to just above 32 degrees Fahrenheit reduces sugar loss by 400% within just two days of picking an annual 2.5 billion pounds of this sweet delicious corn its backyard cookouts around the country corn might seem pretty simple a big green stock some silky fibers and hundreds of kernels tucked into a cob but looks can be deceiving corn affects everything it's become a major player and almost everything we do the complexities of corn are being plumbed in a high security lab buried more than a hundred and sixty feet below the surface of the earth the reason for the security try to imagine a world without corn if we had zero corn we wouldn't have the livestock we wouldn't have a basic staple in our diet we would have problems feeding ourselves to keep their experiments and the rest of the world safe controlled farming ventures put their research facility at the bottom of a sealed limestone cave we design our production system in response to a lot of the very valid concerns here these scientists aren't just crossbreeding corn they're literally building new kinds of corn gene by gene geneticists and corn breeders are in a never-ending struggle to produce better lines to do that researchers first had to decode the corn genome corn has more than 50,000 different genes to put that in perspective you have just 26,000 corn contains almost twice as much genetic information as people plants like corn don't have the ability to move away from stressful environments so it's hot or there's a drought for hot or where Thursday we go walk in the shade and we get a drink the plant has to have within it genetic programming to deal with whatever stress it faces so it needs more genes this genetic richness makes corns DNA easy to modify much of the work done here involves traditional goals like increasing yields and protecting this vital crop from biological dangers should there be a worldwide problem with corn whether it's from disease or insect infestation we can help the development of treatments for that condition corn scientists are pushing corn to be more than just a better plant they're manipulating its individual genes to turn corn into a pharmaceutical factory one day we hope to take what we've learned to develop a line of corn that's going to be able to save lives specifically corn scientists are working on a treatment for the deadly genetic disease called cystic fibrosis that kills more than 450 people every year you know the corn plant is is just gonna be you know a lifesaver literally and and even in that much higher end demand one of the major issues faced by people with cystic fibrosis is that they lack a protein that allows them to digest fats and oils and so they suffer from malnutrition to produce a cystic fibrosis medicine geneticists insert an isolated gene from a dog into corns DNA the hope is that this gene will cause the corn to produce a protein that can be used to treat the disease really it can be anything any gene that you can splice into the corn plant and allow it to replicate itself and still harvest that that product out at the end corn bread to fight cystic fibrosis isn't grown here yet but this cave is the perfect place to mass-produce genetically altered corn this kind of genetic engineering offers astounding advantages but also serious risks what if a genetically modified future corn planet spread its pollen to other plants could it trigger a catastrophic chain of events when you're messing around with experimental plants and you don't know how they're gonna affect any other organisms then then that's when the precautions really need to be taken to try to keep this stuff isolated and prevent it from getting out concerns are not entirely far-fetched other facilities have produced corn kernels that made their own pesticide one that killed a common corn pest the European corn borer but there was a side effect the toxin made its way into corns pollen and killed other organisms unlucky enough to take a bite a monarch butterfly when the butterfly feeds on this genetically modified corn it dies so that is one big concern that people see and they say well if it's affecting the butterflies in this way how is it going to affect me there are also fears that the pollen of genetically modified corn could escape into the wild and combine with the existing crop causing widespread destruction which is another reason that the research here takes place deep within this twisting labyrinth of limestone caverns we are underground the pollen would have to follow a path that's more mysterious than the Kennedy assassination bullet to get outside most consider the risks well worth taking as we understand those processes we will be able to re-engineer the corn plant to do whatever we want it's incredible to think that it all revolves around the humble kernel of corn that each seed of this grass is basically a way of storing energy from the Sun in the form of starch that every kernel is a tiny solar battery developed over 10,000 years of research and development one that can be transformed into so much more more food more fuel possibilities
I've learned so much about corn today
I’m gone for a day and a half and corn takes over the Internet, can’t leave you alone for 10 minutes can I boy
Thank u mod, very cool
The good thing about this meme is it's the lowest this sub could possibly go, and things can only get better from here.
We are going back into the age of stale humor in memes?
I was cool with obscure references but this is some 5 years ago shit.
Corns lit though.
Nigga you expect me to watch this 40 minute video?
Iowa already doesn’t exist
Fun corn fact: If you stick an ear of corn in your asshole and incubate it for 30 days you will find that when you remove it your body has actually melded with and absorbed the beneficial part of the corn (the kernels) and all you will pull out is the cob! Perfect experiment for the kids school project. Science!
10/10 would fap to again