Stop, look and listen to the corn grow
- John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
- June 20, 2023
- 449
Those who know me well are aware I can’t hear worth a lick. She who knows me best suspects I can hear just fine — I just don’t listen worth a darn. While my wife may be on to something there, my personal hearing loss is indeed a fact. And while it’s likely to inconvenience folks around me as I repeatedly say, “I’m sorry, what was that again?” I don’t see it as a huge disability. It can actually be a useful tool in shutting out things I have little interest in hearing anyhow.
There is a downside, of course. As a lifelong birder, it’s tough to triangulate the high-frequency calls of many songbirds. That leaves me to rely on my eyes more than most folks. The good news is I can still see pretty darn well. As a matter of fact, I often feel that years of suppressed hearing have led me to be better at seeing things — a nice advantage for one who dabbles in photography.
One thing I am very excited about watching over the course of the next few weeks is the greening of the crop fields. Sure, I realize our slice of the world has been greening-up good for at least the past two months with undergrowth coming on and trees leafing out, but corn and soybean fields make up most of our acres around here, and they have been stuck on brown for an awfully long time.
The scene around here most recently had been growing frighteningly reminiscent of the drought of ’88 — when it quit raining in early April and never dripped a drop again until mid-July. The sprouted corn made it up to about 3 inches that year and simply stopped growing. By the time the rains came, it was largely a lost cause. With the corn and beans stalled in the same early growth stage over the past several weeks, I couldn’t have been the only one beginning to worry.
Thankfully, on the day prior to this writing, rain finally fell for the first time in four or five weeks in some areas. We got a good half-inch where I sit, and the crops in my neighborhood wasted no time at all in responding. Plants stuck at 3 inches in the morning appeared to be closing in on 5 inches by the time I rode home from work at the end of the day.
More dramatic still will be the rapid disappearance of bare soil in the next week or so. The more the crops grow and leaf out, the more soil is covered, shaded and protected by a canopy of green that’s busy converting solar energy into food, fodder and fuel. Covered soil is dramatically less susceptible to erosion — Conservation 101.
Seeing a green and growing field is great, but “listening” to it has got to be even more of a marvel — even if it’s one that escapes me.
I once worked with a lifelong farmer who told me about the time as a boy that his dad walked him out into the waist-high corn on a dead-still day after a long-awaited rain and told him to listen. Joe told me it was something he’d never forget. They could actually hear the low but obvious roar of thousands of corn plants stretching skyward. Science bears this out as tiny microphones have been tuned to individual plants to capture the sounds of minute fractures that happen over and over within the plant as tissues stretch, break and continue to grow skyward.
Be sure to get yourself out to a corn field this summer to give a listen for a sound not everyone can hear, but every one of us should appreciate.
If you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John Lorson at jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.