Short-crop corn: a revolution in future agriculture

Unfortunately, the chairs of Iranian agricultural researchers have been vacant or have few customers for a long time, and the government is content with political issues, factionalism, and fleeting slogans. How bad!

Now, in a report and analysis, the publication published the views of world agricultural thinkers based on the pathology of corn cultivation and its industrial cultivation (monoculture) on page 34, and on this page, the topic of short stature corn can be seen.

I wish! Iranian researchers would elaborate on the subject in these cases, provide theoretical, expert explanations based on research and implementation.

A number of genetic companies producing corn seeds are introducing a type of hybrid short stature corn seed. These corns are significantly shorter than current hybrid corn plants and often about 50 to 60 centimeters shorter than other corn varieties.

These short corns have certain advantages and characteristics, including the ability to establish themselves better in the ground, the ability to tolerate a larger number of plants in narrower rows, and ease of access in harvesting operations such as; Spraying or fertilizing with current equipment, but the introduction of these new hybrid corns has raised questions for corn promoters and producers.

Questions such as what criteria should be used to compare these new corns with current tall corns. Also, how is their crop produced? The university researchers implementing this project and the investment partners are seeking answers to these questions.

Last year (2023), the researchers implementing the project conducted many comparative tests on conventional and new corns, which resulted in a height of 170 centimeters for the new corn compared to the height of 225 centimeters for the current corns. The average height of the ears above the ground was also 55 cm compared to 92 cm.

Effect of height

Overall, the organs of short-stemmed corn are closer to the ground. However, there are also differences in terms of biomass or weight of living organs per hectare, such that in short-stemmed corn this weight was 7300 kg and in regular and tall-stemmed corn it was 7200 kg.
What happens in short-stemmed corn is that the stem nodes at the bottom of the ears shrink. In short-stemmed corn, the number of leaves is the same, but the number of stems is higher than in regular corn.

Yield

The yield of short-stemmed corn in experimental fields under equal conditions was slightly lower than that of tall corn, while geographical conditions were effective in the yield and varied from 7,500 to 9,000 kilograms. Short-stemmed hybrids showed greater tolerance to increased quantities and narrow rows,

and between 70,000 and 110,000 grains were used per hectare. While the plants were planted in rows with a distance of 45 cm.

This shows that the aforementioned hybrids can tolerate the conditions even if they are planted with a higher number of plants per hectare. However, the most suitable conditions for short-stemmed corn are 13,000 to 17,000 seeds per hectare, which is more than for regular corn.