STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So I grew up in Indiana, where there's corn. Don't mean to shock you. There's a lot of corn. And people used to talk about how you would harvest the corn when the corn is as high as an elephant's eye. There are no elephants, really, in Indiana. But anyway, that was the deal. Corn is tall. But now some farmers and agriculture companies are experimenting to grow shorter varieties of corn. Harvest Public Media's Kate Grumke explains why.
KATE GRUMKE, BYLINE: Farmer Chad Moore is a third-generation farmer who grows corn and soybeans on a farm in central Illinois. His seed dealer suggested he try a new product, short corn.
CHAD MOORE: I had never heard of it before. And, you know, I've always been kind of looking to do things a little bit different, try things out on the farm year after year.
GRUMKE: Now he's in his second year growing the agriculture company Bayer's short-stature corn, called Preceon. The corn doesn't look too different from the road. It's only about 3 or 4 feet shorter than typical corn.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORN RUSTLING)
GRUMKE: But walking in a field, it's obvious.
MOORE: This here is the shorter corn, the Preceon corn. And if you just look down through the row, you can kind of see how thick and dense the leaves are.
GRUMKE: The big change here is that short corn can be planted closer together without causing stress on the plant. Farmers can plant about 20% more short corn per acre.
MOORE: So you've got a denser population, more ears. And it's just a lot more plant matter out here.
GRUMKE: And that's the No. 1 thing many farmers care about.
MOORE: Whether the corn is short or tall, I want to make sure I got the yield out there. And that's the main goal of anything.
GRUMKE: Making crops shorter to increase their yield has happened before. The green revolution in the middle of the 20th century focused first on wheat. Now corn is drawing a lot of attention. Besides Bayer, several other seed companies are selling or developing shorter corn hybrids. Corteva Agrisciences will start selling its own variety of short corn in the next few years. Wendy Srnic, vice president of biotechnology, says farmers are really curious about it.
WENDY SRNIC: There's a lot of optimism, a lot of excitement. And we can't wait to get it in growers' hands so they can see what they think of it.
GRUMKE: Srnic says besides increased yield, the shorter corn is less likely to get knocked over in strong windstorms. And there's another benefit. Shorter plants are much easier to treat with things like fertilizer or fungicides.
SRNIC: With tall corn, you kind of hit a window where you can't get into the canopy. You can't get into the field anymore.
GRUMKE: When the corn is shorter, farmers can tend their crops without having to spray treatments from an airplane. These are all big improvements. But shorter corn is a small change in the grand history of this plant, says Iowa State University professor Pat Schnable.
PATRICK SCHNABLE: The humans that domesticated that crop changed it enormously over about a 5,000-year period or so.
GRUMKE: Now technology is making all kinds of other changes possible. Schnable uses a computer program to dream up designer corn varieties.
SCHNABLE: What's the optimal number of leaves? What's the optimal width of the leaves? And then we can breed towards that.
GRUMKE: Schnable says it's too early to know if farmers will start widely growing short corn, but shorter stocks may be the next chapter in how humans alter the king crop.
For NPR News, I'm Kate Grumke in central Illinois.
(SOUNDBITE OF YEARS' "THE ASSASSINATION OF DOW JONES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.