Questions about GMO, Corn Genetics and some Corn Pictures

[reed]

First of all I can hardly say how happy I am to have found this forum,I have learned so much already. Some is well above my pay grade but I follow most of it, generally. Any way I have some corn pictures and some questions. 

I found the corn pictured here at farmers markets around my area today and would maybe like to use some of it my breeding project but am worried about GMO. The corn was at three different booths in two different markets. The only thing I know about it is someone named Greg grew it near Pleasant Indiana. Pleasant consists of about three houses, four stop signs and a grave yard. it is about 10 miles from my house so this corn very local to my climate. 

First question about the GMO, is there a test that can be purchased or a company or service that can be hired that will test for GMO in a sample and if so is it affordable?
Second question, I read on the SSE web site "The Midwestern summer air is awash with GMO pollen. Corn-belt seed savers who want to ensure they eliminate all GMO contamination may want to learn to hand-pollinate their corn, or grow varieties where GMO contamination is visually apparent, such as white or blue corn".

Is that true? Is there a visually observable color that could indicate GMO and if so would it work in others colors such as red, black or green? Would it remain true or could the GMO be transferred into the other colors? 

Now even if the answers to those questions are not what I want to hear I have a few more about the corn I bought today. That is a penny and a six inch ruler to show scale. 











Now, I'v learned that sweet kernels are wrinkled up, I found three of them total. Also I know what dent is ad there are a few ears mostly that and various kernels on the others but what are the big smooth rounded kernels used for. I tried popping some off of I think cob #3 but nothing. I also know there is something  about it all that chickens like. I have one who escapes the pen almost everyday and though she wasn't in sight when I set this on the picnic table it took her about 30 seconds to show up. Can chickens smell or what the heck was up with that? 

I WILL track down this Greg person and see for myself where it was grown and how close to any big corn fields it was. Anyway, if I can feel confident this isn't GMO contaminated I am going to put some of it in my new corn patch (update on that later) and offer to any of you folks that might want some. Otherwise I think I will sell it as (Ornamental Only) on E-bay or something. 

Any advise, answers and observations are very much appreciated. 

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Pragmatically I think that long term we will end up with low levels of GMO contamination in most corn.

There are tests that can be done... They are pass/fail. You submit like 100 corn seeds and $15 and they report whether or not they found a marker that came from the microorganism which is used to insert the foreign gene into the corn. So it would test for all common GMOs. A fellow I shared seed with submitted a couple of lines of my corn to this type of testing:



You could also do a test at home for Roundup-Ready or Liberty Link corn... Plant a couple of patches of corn. Spray them with the herbicides at the recommended dose/schedule. If it dies then it's unlikely to be GMO. If some survives that gives a good estimate of how contaminated your seed is. That doesn't test for BT corn. I suppose the at-home test for that would be to only save seed from plants that are afflicted by corn-worms.

Pollination is a highly localized phenomena. I took photos yesterday of some corn from my white patch where one seed of a different color was accidentally planted. (Sorry left camera at my daddy's.) The plants 3 feet away had less than a 3% cross pollination rate. Pollination is essentially quadratic. So increasing distance dramatically reduces the odds of cross pollination. Sure there is always pollen that travels long distances, but the dilution factors are staggering. In a 10 mph wind most pollen will fall below silk level within 25 feet. In my community road right-of-ways are 90 feet wide so pollen is unlikely to even cross the road. Pleasant Indiana has a lot of wooded areas which would tend to suppress the travel of pollen. And the corn fields are intermixed with other types of crops which would also tend to suppress cross pollination unless your farmer is planting both types of corn side-by-side.

Second question, I read on the SSE web site "The Midwestern summer air is awash with GMO pollen. Corn-belt seed savers who want to ensure they eliminate all GMO contamination may want to learn to hand-pollinate their corn, or grow varieties where GMO contamination is visually apparent, such as white or blue corn".

SSE seems too focused on purity for my liking. It's one of the primary disagreements I have with how SSE operates. In my experience, the people who have been practicing hand pollination of corn don't have a very good track record of keeping varieties pure or of avoiding inbreeding depression. I just don't see how it can be done successfully.

I don't think any color combination of corn is completely safe from GMO contamination, but chances of identifying outside pollen are much higher if you only grow white sweet corn. Then you'd have to screen perfectly to eliminate any flour, dent, or flint kernels and any kernels that were other colors. Most GMO corn is yellow dent... Both traits would be visible in white sweet corn.

The GMO traits themselves are not visibly observable in the crop. But other genes carried with the GMO trait are in the F1 hybrid seed. If that seed isn't eliminated in the first generation then the GMO genes get randomly distributed among the offspring.

Around here that kind of corn is primarily decorative. Most people in my community wouldn't know how to use corn that doesn't come already processed from a factory. A few might be able to use milled corn. I can't sell flour/flint corn for eating at my farmer's market.

[blueadzuki]

What Joseph said. You CAN grind flint corn into cornmeal, but it tends to be a lot coarser than meal made from either dent or flour corn. Most of the areas that USED to grow it as their dominant corn (like the Northeast) tended to do so as a matter of necessity not choice (flints are often more resistant to thing like insect damage, since a lot of bugs have trouble biting through thick hard starch).

As for GMO, this is just my own opinion (not based on any scientific basis) but I'd say there is a SLIGHTLY higher chance of GMO in the dent cobs especially the extreme dent (like on cob 31). While there are a great many perfectly legitimate OP colored dents out there, comparatively few have made the transition into what I would call the "general" Indian corn population. There are a few that have gone "mainstream" (like Earth Tones, and Oaxaca Green Dent) and a few that were so widespread in the Midwest once their presence in the population out there is still probably pretty strong (like Bloody Butcher). But in my experience, quite a lot of the multicolored dent that floats around in the ornamental corn pools is the result of random crosses between conventional multicolored flints and field dent corn. If there is that much GMO dent corn around you, than, if the crosses occurred locally (and given how much Indian corn travels around the country, who know?) The odds of the dent contributor being GMO is somewhat higher.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Sometimes I have bought a bundle of 3 decorative corn cobs just to acquire the two or three seeds of sweet corn contained on the cobs. Sheesh. And people complained a few years ago about paying $1 per seed for glass gem corn. I'm glad to pay more than that for clever seeds. Sometimes I'll buy a pound of beans for the one seed in the bag that it off-type.

[reed]

Thanks, thanks, thanks for the info and your patience. Can you tell me the name of that testing company? Until I found this forum I believed the stuff about the great clouds of GMO pollen and that it was pretty much impossible to avoid it. 

This is where I live.



There usually isn't another corn plant within a mile of me. The larger patches down by the river and in Kentucky are a least three miles away horizontally and 450' vertically, not to mention the tree shields that surround me. My little ridge is dried up and eroded but it has location.

Not many people in this state have a better spot to isolate corn but it will only work if I start with clean seed. I have collected about 15 varieties of SU, 5 varieties of white SE and 4 dents as well as some I'v grown myself and maybe some of this . I suppose I would have to pay for 4 or 5 separate tests to make sure if one failed that I knew which one it was. 

My ultimate goal is a diverse, adaptable multi-purpose corn. Sweet enough for a summer time treat, as in sweet for a few days each year and only straight from the patch. Then good to make yummy corn bread. And to feed to critters. And I want it to be pretty. I am thinking of using the dents for the most part as mothers and all the sweets for pollen and then start sorting it out the second year.

[Carol Deppe]

Corn pollen can travel long distances. That doesn't mean it does given your specific region and wind and weather conditions and topography. It looks to me from your picture and description of being more than a mile from any other corn patch that you have excellent isolation for corn. I don't think you have much to worry about except what you bring in and plant yourself. I'd find out exactly where the corn was grown and what other corn was nearby before I planted those ears. (If you test the corn for GMOs and it tests dirty, that is that. But if it tests clean, it only says there were no GMOs in the 100 kernels you sacrificed and aren't going to plant. There could still be a stray GMO kernel in what you plant.)

It always helps if you keep seed from the inside of your patch instead of the edges. That way if there is any stray pollen it is more likely to be diluted out by pollen produced by your own patch. In Indian and pioneer days, many crops were "self-isolated" by virtue of the fact that they simply were grown in large enough fields of one variety so that nearly all the seed that was saved came from deep inside the patch. It's when we have tiny patches that we have to pay the most attention to isolation from other varieties. And distance and volume both matter. If there are several square miles of corn a block from where you live, you are going to have some contamination. If there is a neighbor with a small corn patch a block from where you live, that may be no problem.

One way I get avoid GMO contamination is that I have focused on early corns. The GMO feed corns, as far as I know, are all fairly late compared with the corns I breed.

Most GMO corns are yellow dents. You can see a cross of a yellow corn onto a white corn, but not onto another yellow or any other color. And not too many of us would want to limit ourselves to growing just white corn. We can see crosses of a flour onto a flint but not usually the reverse. And dents might or might not show up in crosses to flours or flints. There are now also GM0 sweet corns too.

I personally consider hand pollinating impractical when you are growing enough to use as a serious food source or even to maintain a variety if you are keeping the numbers up. Most Indian or heterogeneous corn has heterogeneous relationships between when the baby ears appear and when the first silks emerge. So you might have to bag and check the ear every day for two weeks just to do a single hand pollination. No thanks.

As to what to do with those round glassy kernels...Those are kernels that have mostly flinty instead of mostly floury endosperm. Pure flint corns, far from being grown just if you can't grow other things, are the best for certain purposes. Buffalo Bird Woman thought her "hard white" (flint) was especially delicious, but it was more difficult to grind than the "soft". Pure flints cook well by boiling or steaming. They make great polenta, mush, corn pudding, and johnnycakes. (And wet-batter cornbread.) Pure flour corns are better baked. I use them mostly for cake, for gravy, and for parching corn (when they are the right color types.) (They also make good wet-batter cornbread.) Dent corns don't make good polenta unless you screen and separate out and use just the flinty part. They don't make good crackers, cookies, etc either. They can make good wet batter cornbread (as do the other types). (Essentially, a wetbatter cornbread starts off being boil/steamed, then ends up being baked.) Any corn can be nixtamalized to make hominy, then tortillas, etc., if you are up for the work. So with a mixed type you pretty much will end up making a wet batter cornbread or nixtamalizing. Colors affect flavor of cornbread a lot, by the way. Every color has a different flavor. Lots of times mixes with lots of different colors in them bake into cornbread that ends up tasting like mud. Some corns actually taste bad. I found one that makes a cornbread that tastes a whole lot like soap. Most "Indian" corns were not mixed color types. They were pure colors. And they were not mixed flint/flour/dent types. They were mostly pure flints or pure flours. I don't grow dents at all because anything I can do with a dent I can do with a flint or flour, but the other things I can do with pure flints or pure flours I can't do with a dent.

Generally, sweet corn does not make good cornbread or polenta. It has a kind of foul bitter taste in cornbread. It has a foul flavor as well as texture as polenta. Those who use do use sweet corn for cornbread are usually diluting it with wheat or other things, not depending upon the cooking and flavor of the corn itself. You can eat any field corn in the green stage, but it may not last long enough in that stage to gather a batch, and it may not be very sweet. Many flour and dent corn varieties are quite sweet in the green stage.

[flowerweaver]

Carol Deppe it's good to have your input. It seems most of the colorful flints come from the northeast, but in the southwest where I live mostly dents are available, possibly because nixtamalizing is so prevalent in the culture. Having two growing seasons I have just started working with both flour and dent corn. This is my first F1 grow out.



reed that's some pretty corn. I like the looks of #28.

[Carol Deppe]

flowerweaver, right about the flours and dents in the SW and flints in the NE. Those NE flints have way more cold and freeze tolerance than most corn. However, there were SE Indian flint varieties. Most flour corns don't do well in areas other regions. The Mandan flour corns and the Tuscarora (and related Cherokee White flour) are among the few exceptions. Generally, the flour corns grown elsewhere get clobbered by stalk molding, molding in the ear, and insects. And while the Mandans did produce some sweet corn, SW Indians mostly didn't. I think it is because the flour corns are so sweet and delicious in the green stage that there really isn't much need for a sweet corn. Alan Kapuler and I reselected a couple of SW varieties for parching quality a couple decades back. I think one is still carried by Seeds of Change. (Parching Supai, Parching Red Supai, Supai Parch corn, they are a bit irregular about what they call it.) Very nice flavor parched, and makes good gravy or bread too. An advantage of the flour corns is that they are so soft you can grind them up in a coffee grinder of vitamixer or any kind of blender. And for parching varieties, you can just toast them in the microwave or a fry pan or even whole ears over a camp fire. Not so with the dents or flints, which take serious grinding.

That lavender color in your ears is actually a modified black. a lavender kernel has the gene for black aleurone and another gene that turns the black to lavender. When it is in a pure flour type it gives you a great parched corn. All flour corns will parch. But only certain colors taste good parched. Lavender, red, pink, or striped or spots of those colors. The red nubbin is carrying pericarp red, which gives you the other major flavor class of parched corn. But for parched corn, you don't want flint or dent character in there. Flints and dents don't parch; if you try you end up with hard tooth-breaking uncooked chunks.

[flowerweaver]

Carol Deppe I've never tasted parched corn, although I look forward to trying it. Fire-roasted corn is popular here, so close to Mexico. Sounds like I should work toward a white corn for flour, and a colored corn for parching. I will look for the Supai, thanks. Interestingly, the flour corn which I just harvested had no issues; it was my spring dent corn that suffered from molding, insects, and huitlacoche. But for us, there was more moisture (and a tornado!) than we've had in a long time and that may have been a contributing factor.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Carol Deppe: Welcome to the forum. You have been making a valuable contribution to the forum and it's members for years already. Glad to have you participating more directly. "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties" changed my gardening world, and set me on a path towards growing all of my own locally adapted varieties that are perfectly attuned to my tastebuds and way of doing things. Sometimes it's been a rough road, especially with the biennials.

[kevin8715]

Sept 28, 2014 19:36:14 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Carol Deppe: Welcome to the forum. You have been making a valuable contribution to the forum and it's members for years already. Glad to have you participating more directly. "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties" changed my gardening world, and set me on a path towards growing all of my own locally adapted varieties that are perfectly attuned to my tastebuds and way of doing things. Sometimes it's been a rough road, especially with the biennials.

I echo this exactly. Read each book thoroughly once. Loved both.

[reed]

Sept 28, 2014 7:08:43 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Sometimes I have bought a bundle of 3 decorative corn cobs just to acquire the two or three seeds of sweet corn contained on the cobs. Sheesh. And people complained a few years ago about paying $1 per seed for glass gem corn. I'm glad to pay more than that for clever seeds. Sometimes I'll buy a pound of beans for the one seed in the bag that it off-type.

I paid a total of $25.00 for all this corn. I bought it cause it has so many different kinds and colors of kernels than I am used to seeing on corn around here, or maybe I never paid attention before. Apparently this Greg fellow makes the rounds of markets and sells it and squashes and stuff wholesale to the vendors, pretty cool job. I'm going back to the markets this weekend and see what else I can find. 

Clearly though, I still have lots to learn on this plant breeding thing, the more I find out the more I realize how little I know - as usual. 

[reed]

Joseph Lofthouse Those three sweet looking kernels are on the other side of cob 26. 
Here they are close up. If you would like to have them just let me know and I will send them to you. 

[blueadzuki]

I'm not sure those ARE sweetcorn. Sweetcorn kernels tend to be transparent/translucent when they dry down, not opaque. Those look more like withered or immature kernels, escpecially since two of them still more or less have their top dents (sweetcorn tends to wrinkle randomly; for it to get the same top dimple as a dent is unusual).

I'm also a little curios about the kernel NEXT to the one in #2; the yellow/lavender one. That looks like it might be a "hemi" chimera (sweet on one side/ non sweet on the other) I've found a few of those , but not with such a dramatic color change between the two side. If Joseph doesn't want it (and you're willing to part with it) I can't probably dig up something interesting to swap you for it.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

reed: I wonder if those kernels are due to the "shrunken" gene? That's a trait that I decided not to incorporate into my garden. I wouldn't like the seeds. It seems to me like shrunken is even harder to work with than sugary enhanced.