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CORN: From Farm to Market by Winifred Hammond

CORN: From Farm to Market

By

Pub Date: Dec. 1st, 1972
Publisher: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

A dull classroom-oriented introduction on the order of the author's previous Farm to Market books. With first person plural condescension Hammond takes readers on visits to some corn farms (Mr. Hardy shows us his modernized family room along with his crops and Mr. Moore offers folksy adages), a storage elevator, and a corn products factory. Each chapter ends with a recapitulation of points to remember (""successful farmers today must have scientific knowledge"") and a totally pointless ""project"" such as counting the husks and measuring the length of silks on an ear, finding the area in acres of a schoolyard and the capacity of a grocery carton in bushels, and making a list of corn products found on the supermarket shelves. There are also sections on the ""great corn civilizations"" and the grain's importance to Indians and early settlers but though Hammond calls the crop supercolossal and stupendous she never conveys the sense of reverence with which it was appropriately regarded. Though the topics of hybrid development, seed banks, and the 1970 blight are briefly covered here, Elting's Mysterious Grain (1967) makes better reading and even Limburg's pedestrian Story of Corn (1971, p. 1018, J-366) answers the same questions with more dispatch.