Breeding Cold Weather Corn

Gardeners across the northern reaches of the Great Lakes have given uptrying to grow sweet corn. That’s because a cool summer, or an earlyfrost,typical for the region could ruin their efforts. But Frank Kutkarefuses togive in. Instead, he’s experimenting on his northern Minnesota farmwithcorn from all over the world. He hopes to create a hardy variety ofcornthat will grow where few others can. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’sStephanie Hemphill visited his farm during the harvest, and filed thisreport:

Transcript

Gardeners across the northern reaches of the Great Lakes have given up
trying to grow sweet corn. That’s because a cool summer, or an early frost
typical for the region could ruin their efforts. But Frank Kutka refuses to
give in. Instead, he’s experimenting on his northern Minnesota farm with
corn from all over the world. He hopes to create a hardy variety of corn
that will grow where few others can. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Stephanie Hemphill visited his farm during the harvest, and filed this report:


On Frank Kutka’s farm, he has asparagus and other favorite vegetables. He also devotes
a quarter of an acre to experiments with two dozen varieties of corn. He’s
trying out seeds from other chilly places around the world. And unlike a lot of plant
research these days, Kutka isn’t manipulating genes in the lab; he’s designing plants the
old-fashioned way, selecting for desired qualities through many generations. In the
popcorn garden, he’s cross-breeding plants from the highlands of Mexico and Peru
with an early New England variety and a good popper from Iowa.


“We have a very nice stalk that you get from the Andean corn and
these hard yellow kernels that you get from the New England corn and so
this is a pretty nice looking corn, it’s much more cold-tolerant than the
original stuff from New England and it also is better adapted to here than
the Andean things are, and sometime here I think we’ll have a very nice
garden variety.”


Kutka is guiding his plants through generation after generation to create a
new variety of corn that will be well adapted to the short, cool northern
summers found in many of the Great Lakes states. He started out trying to
find a successful sweet corn for his own family garden, but now he thinks he might create
varieties that farmers could use for silage – chopped, fermented stalks fed to animals – or
even grain, which nobody tries to grow this far north.


“My whole world has exploded since the first year I started on this
because now I have corns, many of these are tall plants with lots of leaves
and they stand well, they might be good silage corn. And some of them are
early enough we could grow grain up here, ourselves, I think. And the
popcorn goes into local gardens pretty nicely, so there’s so many possibilities.”


Kutka shared some of his seeds with Carlton County Extention Agent Troy
Salzer. In the north, where agriculture is barely possible, Salzer says
farmers could benefit in a big way if they could grow a well-adapted corn.


“In years like this where we had late frost it could make quite a
dramatic difference. In our area specifically we do get a lot of cool east
winds off the lake, and If we had corn varieties that were cold tolerant,
that wouldn’t set them back so far.”


There’s another advantage to the plants Kutka is experimenting with. Some
of them have a lot more protein and minerals than standard corn.
Successful farming depends on finding a specialty niche, and corn with high
protein or oil content can be used as specialty feeds. South Dakota State
University researcher Zeno Wicks says some farmers are also interested in
breaking away from the highly consolidated seed market.


“Monsanto owns DeKalb, DuPont owns Pioneer. Two of the biggest
chemical companies now own the two biggest corn companies and a whole
different wing of people start to get concerned along those lines. Not
just hippies but people who are like hey I like to buy by corn from one
place and my chemicals from another.”


Kutka, meanwhile, seems to be having a lot of fun in his cornfield, and
he’ll probably never stop trying new combinations.


“There’s so much variety as far as kernel shape, size, colors,
number of rows, and yeah you never know exactly what you’re gonna get when
you pop one open. I have a lot of fun in my garden. I think it’ll be
useful but it’s also good for me.” (laughs)


Kutka has just enrolled in graduate school to learn more about plant
genetics, and he’s gotten a federal grant to research the nutritional
content of his corn and to search for ways to market it. I’m Stephanie
Hemphill in Duluth.