Everybody's looking for a straw to grab onto. The other night we ate 42 ears of corn between us. Now that sounds like a lot until you think that there were only four or five kernels on each one. Livestock farmers like Pry and Shafer are especially hard-hit because they depend on a healthy crop of corn, mixed in with grasses and alfalfa, to feed their herds. We'd all go broke.
Farmers can use the whole corn plant - that is, when it rains enough for a plant even to grow.
The ear gets shucked and shelled, with its kernels ground at a mill and sold as feed for chickens and turkeys. The stalk and leaves then get chopped up, mixed with grass and stored in a silo as food for the cows. But to do the farmers any good, a corn stalk needs to be of decent height. Corn should be cut a foot from the ground since weed killer and insecticide sprayed on it settle in the lowest part of the stalk. But this stuff's almost too small to bother cutting.