What was this crop

JDMAN60

Member
This week I drove across northern Indiana and saw alot of fields of some crop I am not sure what it was. I am hoping some one can tell me what it was. This crop looked like corn , planted in rows similar to corn, it looked like it had been detasseled the tops were all the same height, every fifth row had been mowed off at the ground , and they were loading it into a truck with some type of cart that dumped sideways.Until I saw the dump cart I thought it was seed corn but now I dont know. Anyone know what this was?
 
They harvest the whole ear for seed corn. So it is kind of like picking corn was years ago.

The rows you saw missing where the "male" rows. After pollination they are destroyed so they are not accidently harvested.

The "female" rows had the tassel cut off so they had to cross pollenate with the male. This is how you get "hybrid" seed corn.

It always surprised me that seed corn looks like crap compared to the hybrid corn it produces.
 
that was my first thought also but what ever they are harvesting with cut the whole stalk of and dumps it in a bin but it was not blown into a forage wagon
 
Some seed corn producers are chopping the male rows into silage rather than leaving them on the ground. The chopper straddles 4 rows and chops the other 2. Seed corn is picked in the ear with the husk on. They don't want any shelling in the field with seed corn at about $250 per bag. A good yield is about 25-30 bushels per acre. They are ecstatic with 35 bushels per acre. Lots of it is grown in the LaGrange & Steuben county Indiana and St. Joseph & Branch county Michigan.
 
(quoted from post at 03:01:47 09/21/14) that was my first thought also but what ever they are harvesting with cut the whole stalk of and dumps it in a bin but it was not blown into a forage wagon

I would bet that the whole stalk was NOT going into the bin. The header was stripping the ears off and then chopping the corn stalk up on the ground. Many of the new corn heads do this.
 
A few years ago here in southeast Idaho they started growing some grass around here that looked exactly like corn when it was smaller, and it grew just as tall. If you looked close, there weren't tassels, but the head of a BIG grass. I asked the farmer up the road what it was, and he said it's some kind of Sudanese 8' tall grass. The cows lay into it like it's sugar cane, lol.
There's a field of it right next to my yard, and every year at this time, the red-winged blackbirds pile into it right at dusk until their trilling is deafening. I love it. I wonder if that's what you're seeing.
 
You were right it was probably seed corn there is alot of it raised up here in northern Indiana. There's also getting to be a lot of tomatos being raised in northern Indiana.
 

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