Fast but Finnicky

Corn grows amazingly fast. From seed-in-the-ground to harvesting takes just a little over four months. The pictures, taken just two days ago, show corn from my farm. This is corn for making animal feed and not sweet corn that we eat. In the lower picture, the conveyer belt is taking corn up to a machine that removes the kernels and puts them in the truck. This part of the operation is done by workers from the company that buys my corn.

To see for myself what it's like to work in the field, I joined a group of people whose job was to harvest corn and peel the husk off. It's all manually done and no machinery of any kind is used during harvesting. I grab an ear of corn, break it from the stem, peel the husk off, and place it in a bin. The pay for doing hard and tedious work in hot and humid weather is 45 baht ($ 1.40) per sack (a sack is about 25% bigger than a large garbage bag). A skilled worker can fill about a sack an hour. I worked for only 30 minutes and that was quite enough challenge for me.

Rain can make or break a corn crop. At the time of planting, there must be sufficient moisture in the soil for seeds to sprout, but once young seedlings are just above the ground, more rain might wash them away because the root structure isn't deep enough. So first you need rain, and then right away you need not to have rain. After that, you need rain again for the plant to grow, but when the plant begins to flower, rain must stop so as not to destroy the most essential part from which corn will grow. And then you need rain again.

Irrigation and mechanization can help, but the problem is capital investment. Small farming operations don't operate with the benefit of economies of scale.

All the same, despite global warming trends causing unpredictable weather patterns all over the world, the western part of Thailand where Banrai is located has generally been blessed with abundant and timely rainfall, perhaps because there is a huge and well-preserved forest nearby called Huey Kha Kang.

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Photo location: Banrai, Uthaitani province