Corn doesn't deserve to be the villain here

October 9, 2024 12:29 PM

Corn sweat is real. Corn draws in water, then releases it into the air through evaporation. And all that moisture produced by more than 90 million acres of corn nationwide can make it more humid.
posted by cupcakeninja (25 comments total)

To think that people laughed at that adorable Corn Kid when he wisely pointed out that it has the juice.
posted by dr_dank at 1:03 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

Corn is absolutely a terrible crop, requiring huge amounts of fossil fuel input, relative to soy, wheat, and just about anything else grown in the corn belt. It does huge damage to our soil carbon, and I'm pretty sure it transpires more too. We don't even eat hardly any of the corn we grow, it's mostly turned into ethanol (unsustainable and at a carbon loss), and food for cattle (also environmental disasters). Corn is pretty much the most damaging agricultural practice in the modern US. I'll be back later with citations.
posted by SaltySalticid at 1:09 PM on October 9 [5 favorites]

I drove through eastern Iowa in late August and in the late afternoon you could see the mist hanging above the fields. The humidity was insane. And it all travelled east and caused some incredible thunderstorms over Chicago on the night of the 27th.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:13 PM on October 9

I spent my teen years in southern Illinois. I'm the only person I know who walks off a plane into dense humidity and sighs in pleasure. Feels like youth.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:28 PM on October 9 [2 favorites]

Corn is absolutely a terrible crop, requiring huge amounts of fossil fuel input, relative to soy, wheat, and just about anything else grown in the corn belt. It does huge damage to our soil carbon, and I'm pretty sure it transpires more too. We don't even eat hardly any of the corn we grow, it's mostly turned into ethanol (unsustainable and at a carbon loss), and food for cattle (also environmental disasters). Corn is pretty much the most damaging agricultural practice in the modern US. I'll be back later with citations.

Good golly. This was supposed to be a non-serious post about a silly phrase I just learned about today: corn sweat. Yes, of course ruinous monocrops are terrible. Yes, of course anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of modern agriculture knows it has serious problems, corn definitely included. You don't need to trot out citations. Really. This is trivially easy to research, for the curious. Please consider letting this one slide by and just letting people have a little laugh or joy or whatever.
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:30 PM on October 9 [31 favorites]

This was supposed to be a non-serious post about a silly phrase I just learned about today

See, this is exactly the kind of cropaganda that Big Farmah wants to distract from the real issues this October: candy corn is terrible.
posted by pwnguin at 2:54 PM on October 9 [21 favorites]

My biometeorology prof also talked about lilac sweat — not by that name, but lilac phenology in the US NE spring raises humidity all of a sudden.
posted by clew at 2:56 PM on October 9 [1 favorite]

Without corn we wouldn’t have corn mazes, which aren’t even fun but you just have to do them. [1]

But yeah it’s humid as fuck in summer in the Midwest. When I say to my coastal friends I can’t tolerate more than 75 degrees and they look at me strange I have to emphasize it’s because if it’s 75 degrees you’re almost guaranteed to be walking through S O U P.
posted by brook horse at 3:07 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

Along with creamed corn, this makes want corn even less!
posted by waving at 4:08 PM on October 9

Having lived my whole life in the corn belt, i have noticed that the humidity during July-August has gotten much worse in the past 25 years. I don't remember the humidity being this bad very often in the 1990s. The excess humidity seems to coincide with the ethanol industry taking off in the 2000's, and the more intense corn production methods that were associated with it (higher density planting, more fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides applied, GMO seeds and traits that increase production and stress tolerance). Most native plants and trees growing in the area have serious leaf disease in late summer from the excess humidity (and signs of too much nitrogen from the manure that is spread on the fields all year that blows and washes away, fertilizing everything downwind and downstream from the fields). Now during corn sweat season the mold from all the diseased vegetation has been causing new serious allergies me. Then of course you have the massive loss of biodiversity associated with corn production, especially insects and pollinators.
I almost forgot the harvesting dust! That is fun right now, Huge clouds of irritating allergenic dust about a month starting in late September.
posted by GiantSlug at 4:20 PM on October 9 [5 favorites]

Wait, if crops can make it more humid, does that mean that maybe "rain follows the plow" after all?
posted by The Tensor at 4:55 PM on October 9

Corn sweat can add 5-10 degrees to the dew point via evapotranspiration. This is the difference between "sticky" and "oppressive". Evapotranspiration maxes during tasseling and flowering. Modern corn is bred to hit those two stages at the same time because that drives the harvest productivity.
posted by pdoege at 5:02 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

To be fair, corn directly from the field is pretty darned good.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:39 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

Which is worse: corn or nuclear winter?
posted by Diskeater at 7:54 PM on October 9 [3 favorites]

From the tumblr thread linked by "brook horse", in a conversation between "worldsspecialestboy" and "dbdslut":
>
> Everyone can't know everything at once and if we could, we'd all be bored. :)

Now there's a philosophy I can get behind at any time of year ...
posted by nickzoic at 9:22 PM on October 9 [2 favorites]

I’m surrounded by corn fields. We’re just out of corn sweat ‘n’ aerial pesticide application season and into the damn grain elevator is noisy all night season
posted by salix at 10:15 PM on October 9 [4 favorites]

Former (great) WGN TV meteorologist Tom Skilling talked about this many times in his segments. The biomass of all that corn can make summers equivalent to the tropics near the Amazon. Mass production of corn causes increased humidity.

Friend of mine has a house with a double lot, and he used to have minor but persistent flooding in his basement. He had a type of garden built (at some expense) where they excavated a bunch of the clay in areas, filled it with gravel, then topped it with soil. Strategic areas were planted with damp-loving, perennial shrubs and such that are particularly good at sucking water out of the soil and into the air. He no longer gets floods.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:41 AM on October 10 [2 favorites]

When you plant corn, you are fighting misorghumy, ricism and wheat supremacy.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:04 AM on October 10 [1 favorite]

Perhaps not so serious as corn as a crop = bad, a small anecdote regarding accumulated corn sweat. My partner takes our large dog out to a nearby farm for an early morning walk. A favourite thing for him to do is to carefully bend the leaves of the corn and drink from the pooled water collected in the leaves. It is a delight to watch a dog as big as a grown man delicately drink corn sweat from a corn leaf.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:29 AM on October 10 [6 favorites]

Corn sweat can add 5-10 degrees to the dew point via evapotranspiration. This is the difference between "sticky" and "oppressive". Evapotranspiration maxes during tasseling and flowering. Modern corn is bred to hit those two stages at the same time because that drives the harvest productivity.

As temperature rises, humidity also gets worse as hot air holds far more moisture than colder air.

If I recall correctly (the data is hard to find and then interpret by me - I'm not an expert) at 50F and a dewpoint of 45F (so relatively humid for that temp) the air holds about 1 cup of moisture per ~1000 cubic ft. At 90F, a dewpoint of 70F holds a cup of water every 4 of 5 cubic feet, so the moisture surrounding a single person is enough to bake a cake.

I have an outstanding personal project to get these to be accurate human-understanable measurements given temperature and relative humidity, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:56 AM on October 10

Which is worse: corn or nuclear winter?

As a ghost who is unable to eat anything due to non-corporealness, I'm personally of the opinion that corn is worse.

Oh well, back to haunting.
posted by A_Ghost_User at 10:07 AM on October 10

(it's spelled incorporeity)
posted by mittens at 10:42 AM on October 10 [2 favorites]

Strategic areas were planted with damp-loving, perennial shrubs and such that are particularly good at sucking water out of the soil and into the air. He no longer gets floods.

Would it have been more effective to plant corn?

(We breed and manage corn for high Water Use Efficiency WUE, so maximizing the amount of water that turns into corn rather than returning to the atmosphere in transpiration.)
posted by clew at 11:44 AM on October 10

Does the humidity from corn make severe weather events like tornadoes more likely? I once heard a meteorologist opine that turning the Great Plains into cornfields is part of why Tornado Alley is so destructive now.
posted by lloquat at 11:58 AM on October 10

I felt stunned and betrayed when I found out that the vast majority of corn planted today is inedible. Bring back sweetcorn.
posted by zymil at 5:24 PM on October 10