Today, corn continues to be the backbone of modern American agriculture. During his 1540 expedition into the Southwest, Coronado found blue corn and other flour corns to be major staples of Pueblo Indians. Blue corn is still an important element in Native American religious rituals.
Most blue corns grown in the Southwest are flour corns.
The kernels are made of soft, floury endosperm covered by a hard shell. A thin layer of the outer cells contain blue pigment, giving the corn its color. Blue corn plants also vary in height and flowering periods. Plants may send up extra stalks and tend to lodge or fall over when they mature, making blue corn difficult to harvest mechanically. Blue corn improvement is a slow process of selecting ears from ideal plants in the fall and saving seed for next year's crop.