WYOMING, Iowa — Taking a late-summer country drive in the Midwest means venturing into the corn zone, snaking between 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out nearly everything other than the sun and an occasional water tower.
Cameron Sorgenfrey holds a tall corn stalk next to a short corn stalk along one of his fields Sept. 16 in Wyoming, Iowa.
The corn is a part of rural America as much as cavernous red barns and placid cows.
But soon, that towering corn might become a miniature of its former self, replaced by stalks only half as tall as the green giants that have dominated fields for so long.
“As you drive across the Midwest, maybe in the next seven, eight, 10 years, you’re going to see a lot of this out there,” said Cameron Sorgenfrey, an eastern Iowa farmer who has been growing newly developed short corn for several years, sometimes prompting puzzled looks from neighboring farmers. “I think this is going to change agriculture in the Midwest.”
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Bayer Crop Science spokesman Brian Leake takes a photo as he stands among short corn in a field Sept. 16 in Wyoming, Iowa.
