corn news stories on Newser

Record Corn Harvest Could Sink Food Prices

Thu, 10 May 2012 15:40:35 CDT

Consumers could see some relief from higher food prices by late fall, if the latest government crop forecast holds up. The US Agriculture Department predicted today that corn production will total 14.8 billion bushels, with a record yield of 166 bushels per acre. That compares with 12.4 billion...

Environmentalists Fear New Biotech Corn

Matt Cantor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:33:05 CDT

Debate is raging over a new biotech corn engineered by Dow Chemical. The corn, called "Enlist," is intended to solve farmers' struggle against tough weeds; that's because it's resistant to a powerful herbicide, also made by Dow. But environmentalists fear that wind, heat, and humidity would carry the herbicide toward...

Potatoes Make Junk Food —but They're Not Junk

Evann Gastaldo — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:17:20 CST

Corn and potatoes get a bad rap, due to the fact that we mainly consume them in junk food form. But corn and potatoes themselves are, Mark Bittman reminds us in the New York Times , "real food"—unlike, say, Pringles, which are potato chips that contain just 42% actual potato....

Seed Shortage Buries Hopes for Record Corn Crop

Rob Quinn — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:02:00 CST

American farmers had been planning the biggest corn planting since World War II this spring, but they're being thwarted by a seed shortage. Drought conditions in the Midwest and Great Plains last year have caused what dealers in the corn belt say is the biggest shortage of top-quality seeds they've...

Uh-Oh: Bugs Develop Resistance to Franken-Corn

John Johnson — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:01:32 CDT

Farmers in Iowa who planted corn seeds genetically modified to fend off the dreaded corn rootworm are seeing a troubling sign: The rootworm is apparently developing a resistance to the Monsanto seeds and gobbling up cornfields again, say Iowa University researchers. It's still just a small percentage of rootworms that...

Forget Corn Syrup: Now It's 'Corn Sugar'

Evann Gastaldo — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 07:45:02 CDT

The backlash against high-fructose corn syrup has finally led its makers to try out a new name: corn sugar. The Corn Refiners Association wants people to know that—according to its marketing campaign—"whether it's corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can't tell the difference. Sugar is sugar." The...

Fiber-Rich Corn Offers Digestive, Uh, Benefit

Nick McMaster — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:07:36 CDT

Corn is an American staple—it helped the earliest settlers survive and has provided us with bread and meal ever since. Recently, though, corn has been portrayed in a more unfavorable light, whether as the source of high-fructose corn syrup or the recipient of ethanol subsidies. From a nutritional perspective,...

EPA Eyes Crackdown on Not-So-Green Biofuels

Katherine Thompson — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:24:54 CDT

Plants consume carbon dioxide, so growing corn to produce ethanol should be at worst a zero-sum game, emissions-wise, right? Wrong, says the EPA. There's another factor involved: Turning food crops into fuel drives up their prices, which raises demand for farmland worldwide. In places like Brazil, that means chopping down...

New Super-Corn Packs Multi-Vitamins

Nick McMaster — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:12:05 CDT

Scientists have genetically engineered a strain of corn that dramatically boosts the naturally occurring amounts of three critical vitamins, the Los Angeles Times reports. The enhanced strain of African white corn produces six times the vitamin C, double the amount of folate, and 169 times the beta carotene, a vitamin...