In today's episode: Does corn really need to be so tall? It's time to explore this concept of reduced stature corn, otherwise commonly referred to as short corn. When you picture a mature cornfield, I imagine you're probably thinking of tall green stalks, towering overhead, and there are some agronomic advantages and disadvantages to this.

So some corn breeders are developing varieties that are intentionally shorter. One of those breeders is Dr. Sarah Lira, who you've already heard from on this show back on episode eight when she was talking about perennial ground cover.

“ And that's basically the system we're setting up for breeders with short corn, is that they can focus on selecting on yield and they can focus on selecting on yield in higher densities. So when you can plant the plants in a higher density, they're not going to get tall and fall over. So you can continue to select on yield more aggressively than we've ever been able to do before.” - Dr. Sara Lira

Sarah has also been working on some shorter corn varieties and this concept of reduced stature corn. It has a lot of farmers intrigued. Blake Johnson is one of those farmers. He's a fifth generation corn farmer in Nebraska.

“ Probably the most exciting thing that we've been looking at on the horizon that is not here yet is short statured corn, because when we're in the high yielding environment. We're wanting to push populations. A lot of times when you push that population, those plants are gonna fight in that competitive environment and actually get taller than they should.” - Blake Johnson

Some takeaways from this episode include:

1. The very real problem of lodging, which is creating real demand for reduced stature corn.
2. The idea that reduced stature corn could actually have just as much plant residue as standard corn.
3. It’s definitely interesting to get a glimpse into the research and development pipeline, and encouraging to hear of the first trait reaching the field in the coming years.

Agriscience Explained is brought to you by Corteva Agriscience and hosted by Tim Hammerich. This show is produced by Clint Pilcher, Rayda Krell and Ann Leonard. Jaime Hammerich and Grant Bolton edit these podcasts, and the music was composed by Dmitri Volkov. Subscribe for more Agriscience Explained: From Science to Solutions.