Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Betty Fussell

Translating these lands into their own agricultural language of mixed crops and animals required the colonists to establish boundaries between pasture and non-pasture. The need for more pasture mandated burning forests entirely, not just the undergrowth, then planting corn and rye to ready the soil for planting English grasses to provide hay for livestock. Their agricultural language required the plow, which both compacted the soil and created a monoculture that exhausted it. For the colonists, "natural resources" meant commodities that were measured by an abstract equivalence--money.

Land itself was the basic commodity, a form of capital which had to be consumed to produce more capital, to increase wealth. The context of John Locke's often quoted statement that "In the beginning, all the world was America" implied his conclusion: "The staple of America at present consists of Land, and the immediate products of Land." In changing the meaning of the word "staple" from a cereal grain to land and its cash equivalent, America's colonists commodified the earth.

The Commodification of Corn

That is the process by which maize became corn. The premise didn't change, only the techniques did. The industrial, the petrochemical, the bioengineering age: the goal throughout has been to control nature in order to transform it into capital. In this rapid transformation, native populations killed off by disease were replaced by livestock, while campfires were replaced by the fixed hearth, which evolved into the stove, the furnace, the foundry, the factory. Since the goal was to increase yield in order to increase capital, when maize with its innate potential for kernel volume turned into corn, it proved to be a goldmine for the industrial age.

"Decade after decade, beginning in 1780," Henry Wallace wrote in Corn and Its Early Fathers, "the progress of American civilization was measured by the western expansion of the corn acreage." In the middle of the nineteenth century, four tools came together to produce industrial corn: John Deere's "singing plow," the railroad, a new form of milling, and a new technique of hybridization. With the steel plow, vast areas could be planted at once on an industrial scale. With the railroad, corn converted into livestock could be mass produced and distributed in the industrialization of husbandry. With steel roller-mills, corn could be separated into its chemical components. With the new science of genetics, corn could be crossbred for volume and uniformity.

Henry Wallace's methods of controlling pollination by a double-cross hybrid produced today's high-yield commercial field corn, once called Corn Belt Dent and now called "#2 Yellow, or Commodity Corn." Each ear is the offspring of two pair of grandparents and one pair of parents, a system that transformed 8-rowed Indian maize into 24-rowed hybrid corn. The seed of this ear, however, is infertile, so that the hybridizing process must be repeated with each new crop. In other words, seed corn is now a specialty commodity, patented and controlled by companies like Wallace's original company now called Pioneer International. By applying the principles of mass production and distribution to the plant world, Wallace turned agriculture into big business and the landscape of the Midwest into an endless corn factory