Corn is the world's number one feed grain and silage crop. Its unmatched combination of yield and nutritional quality optimizes farm efficiency, in the field as well as in the barn, producing more pounds of beef, more litres of milk, and more pounds of pork and poultry per acre than any other crop. Grain corn has also earned key human consumption markets, ranging from its use in distilleries to the production of sweeteners, cooking oil, breakfast cereals and corn chips. Increasingly, market demand is bolstered by industrial uses, including starches for the paper industry and raw materials for paint manufacturers. Until recently, many of the advances in hybrid corn have been out of reach for growers in western Canada.
Corn is a grass.
Unlike cereal crops, however, its male and female floral parts are produced in different areas of the plant. Most corn plants should be managed to produce a single ear. Multiple earing occurs on sunny outside rows and where population is low. Some hybrids also tend to put out a second and sometimes a third ear. Hybridization also makes the plant bigger and more stress resistant.