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Comment by deadmetheny | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely. Corn is grown to excess for purposes of livestock feed and fuel due to various subsidies for ethanol production. At least here in the Midwest, almost none of the corn grown is for actual human consumption. Additionally, corn is an awful crop, it requires a ton of nitrogen and water to grow well. I'm very much for less of it being grown here.

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That midwestern corn is unfit for direct human consumption, but it shows up as a number of filler ingredients in highly processed (junk) food. So it's in your cows and chickens, but also in every soda you drink and in your kid's breakfast cereal. And pretty much every commercial baked good (modified food starch).

And the mills smell awful. Like someone took a paper mill, and took out the sour part of the smell and replaced it with moldy gym socks.

Corn starches and the products created from them are some of the most versatile things we have in commercial food production.

It’s important to hedge your bets with the food supply, but ‘versatile’ (or even, in the case of corn, durable) isn’t the only or even the most important metric. Nutritious, efficient, healthy are important too.

Have you been to the Midwest? There are places where you can drive hundreds of miles and see almost nothing but corn and a bit of soy.

If you take the backroads you’ll find pigs, cows, a bit of alfalfa and hay, sweet corn and the odd field of popcorn. But along the interstates it’s corn, soy and more corn to the horizon.

corn is an awful crop

I've only been gardening a season but I've already come to the same conclusion. The corn stalks were the divas of the bed, wilting days before anything else and underproducing. Especially compared to the squash plants.

Oh dear, corn is an exceptionally terrible garden crop - a high-producing stalk gives you 2-3 ears at maximum, saps the nitrogen in the soil, and requires a ton of space. You'd need to plant a huge volume of it to get any sort of decent harvest. It's a shame, since fresh sweet corn is delicious, but it's something where I'd rather just buy some from a guy who grew a quarter acre of it as a hobby crop.

If there is ever an apocolypse leaving me dependent on personal agriculture, I’m planting nothing but squash. Until then keep it away from my backyard.

I would rethink your post-apocalyptic single-crop garden if I were you. Diversify, diversify, diversify.

If you're in the US and starting with squash, then the logical option would be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

I've found companion planting beneficial, but have had terrible luck with the corn aspect of 3-sisters. It seems best suited for warmer US zones (6+), where corn can go in the ground well before beans. Otherwise, the beans will quickly overtake the corn.

I always have some tomato cages ready as backup, because even if the corn is big enough to support the beans, a gust of wind can blow it all over.

Also, deer eat corn shoots. Damn you, deer. Damn you.

I didn't care much for squash until I discovered spaghetti squash. I'll usually find space for at least one plant now.

I love spaghetti squash! Sadly, you rarely see it in the UK. In fact, you rarely see any squash except butternut here, which i'm not a fan of.

There's a farm somewhere south of London which does pick-your-own pattypans, and apparently at harvest time is overrun with South Africans, who evidently feel very strongly about them.

I've never heard of pattypans, they look absolutely delightful! I may have to experiment with them in the garden next year.

I loved butternut squash until we grew it and generated 98248928 squashes.

But that's the thing, in temperate climates, nothing makes calories as well as corn. Since growers just respond to the external incentives to create ethanol and meat and everything else that's made from those calories, they are actually meeting the need in the most environmentally responsible way. Or put another way, if we were to transition to not corn, which 200 million acres of virgin habitat should we cut down?

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