#like ive been living literally surrounded with maize my entire life

[botanyshitposts]

wikipedia page: cassava is a hugely important crop, especially in third world countries. it’s the most prominent source of carbohydrates in the world behind rice and maize. 

me: o nice. go on

wikipedia page: usually its great but it also has cyanide in it and some varieties will just straight up kill people and its just like A Thing That Can Happen. most of the plant is literally inedible on a good day. this means that most people living with it as a staple in their diet have ways to process it first to casually remove the cyanide, especially when dealing with more poisonous varieties, but deaths still happen and they get worse during years where environmental conditions are poor in which the plants cope by producing even more cyanide. usually other crops are outright dying in the same conditions, meaning more people turn to them to avoid starvation only to face A Huge Amount Of Actual Cyanide

me: 

[botanyshitposts]

Ah yes, it begins, the time of year where the corn fields become unsettlingly nakey

ok i know ive talked about this before on here but god it’s such An Experience when this happens. like i was born and raised in iowa and i still live here in my adult life and like…. 

not to be like, unnecessarily Dramatic™ on main, especially to an ask like this, but storytime, when i was growing up to get to my school district you had to drive out of our suburban town through a maze of corn fields and it’s just. like. wild. like, it didn’t really hit me when i was growing up but as an adult now studying botany, when you think about it, having this very transient experience with such a massive expanse of plants is….pretty weird in a really botany-specific way? like you, as a child, in all seasons, drive past these fields in their stages of growth, and then when the days get short again you watch the farmers come out in the dark with their headlights on to just start mowing down this wall of living stuff twice your size that you watched grow, and then suddenly one day you’re left with this endless expanse of uninterrupted desolate land that gets covered in snow so for months wind pushes the cars on the road and snow drifts like those sand dunes in movies bc there’s quite literally like, no woody vegetation buffering the elements out there, and the farmhouses have trees planted around them in boxes to keep the heating bills down in the house, and it’s dark when you drive through it all to go to school and dark when you drive through it all to go home and it’s like. the interaction you have with these plants and with the land you live on is watching a huge chunk of it just…disappear. it’s weird as hell. 

to people who haven’t grown up in midwestern america: i’m not talking like, a cornfield, im talking like, an expanse. iowa corn harvested for grain alone came in at 2.51 billion bushels in 2018 (about 63 million tons). the same year farmers here were putting out 196 bushels (around 5 tons) of corn per acre. when anon says ‘the fields get nakey’ its like. quite literally billions of tons of plant matter are getting removed. 

i have worked manual labor in these fields. you can walk in a straight line for hours through these fields and not come across a house. this kind of scale of industrial farming is just. incredible when you think about it, as in 300 years ago this would have been science fiction. like 300 years ago growing up around this would have been some serious ray bradbury ‘all summer in a day’ kind of wild shit. just the sheer size of the landscape that you know is not permanent to the extent where you don’t even question it when it goes away, the nature of the plants themselves (what the fuck even is maize), the economic and social importance of this cycle of plant life and death not just to your community but to a larger extent of world imports and exports (fun fact, iowa is one of the few places in the US where if you were to put a glass dome over our entire state, we would be able to sustain ourselves off our farms without even changing any of our food consumption bc we’re an agricultural powerhouse in multiple areas), and its just like……wild lmao. 

like yeah they get nakey but if you think about it it’s pretty wild that we live in a world where you send me this ask that essentially is like ‘its that time of year where the entire surroundings in agricultural areas are removed in industrial quantities to the point where you would probably die from exposure if you tried to walk the expanse of those fields in the dead of iowa winter because there’s literally like no naturally occuring shelter aside from tiny patches of forest that sometimes pop up between fields and you’d probably also get snow blindness without eye protection for that same reason’ and im like ‘o yeah lmao its just that time of year!!!!’ like what even is this. what botanical timeline do we live in