Nebraska State Historical Society

By Gregory DL Morris

The common breakfast of sausage, egg and cheese rolled in a tortilla is actually corn with corn with corn with corn. Most likely the vehicle that transported the eater to the café or grocery store for that meal was fuelled in part by corn.

Production of corn in the United States was projected to be 16.81 billion bushels in 2025. At the October price of $ 4.22 a bushel, that’ s about $ 70 billion. In contrast, US production of gold is worth about $ 12 billion a year. That makes the yellow grain, not the yellow metal, the true El Dorado.

Compared to corn, the next largest crop, soybeans, is not even close at 4.3 billion bushels expected to be grown in the United States in 2025. Wheat is a distant third at 1.9 billion bushels.

How one crop, Zea mays, came to dominate not just US agriculture but large swaths of the entire economy, is due to three main factors: the inherent qualities of the plant, the convergent interests of multiple large industries and the complex politics of agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

The two major end uses for corn in the United States are animal feed and motor fuel. About 40 % is used for cattle, hogs

Men pumping fuel for cars at the Earl Coryell station in Lincoln, Nebraska, April 11, 1933. and poultry— mostly on factory farms. Another 40 % is used to make ethanol that is blended by federal mandate into gasoline. The balance of 20 % is other uses, including human food. Most of that is in highly refined ingredients in processed foods and personal-care formulations. The amount of corn that people eat as corn is a vanishingly small fraction of total production.

To be clear, corn on the cob or in the can is a variety called sweet corn. The vast majority of the crop is field corn, which would taste tough and starchy if eaten. And there is the first part of the magic formula. All plants use photosynthesis to turn air and water into sugars and starches. Some, called C4s, are better than others at it. Many C4s are warm-season grasses, including corn, sugar cane, sorghum, millet and switch grass.

“ C4s tend to be extremely well adapted to hot, dry climates by using a lot of water to keep cool,” said Margaret Smith, professor of plant breeding and genetics in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University.“ They are more efficient at fixing carbon to make carbohydrates.” From 2020 to 2025, Smith served as associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, and as director of the Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station.

The predecessor of modern corn was first cultivated in Central America about

9,000 years ago. From that time, humans have been cross-breeding various strains to enhance favored traits. Smith explained that virtually all field corn planted commercially today is a type of hybrid called F1 in which each plant in the first generation will be identical, but each plant in the second generation will vary widely.

The advantage is that each stalk will grow at the same rate to the same height and be ready for harvesting at the same time. The disadvantage is that if the grower were to save kernels to plant the next year, those second-generation stalks would all be different heights and would mature at different times. That means growers have to buy seed corn every year. So what used to be a self-sustaining crop became an annuity for seed companies.

An important turning point in the business history of corn came in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.“ That is when subsidies were put in place,” said Smith,“ and also the same time that breeders came out with the first hybrids. That was a huge change. Farmers had always saved seed to plant the next year. One hybrid planted in Iowa was particularly drought tolerant and had about double the yield, even under poor conditions. In 1935, abut 6 % of the corn planted in Iowa was hybrid. By 1938, it was half. By 1940, it was virtually all.”

The same thing happened in other states, but less rapidly. Big yields could

24 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2025 | www. MoAF. org