Corn Field Madness

I've been here before. My field is roughly 5" deep by 18" long and has over 350 stalks by JTT. They are all roughly spaced 1/4" apart. They are expensive but they are hard to beat when it comes to their appearance. All other corn products looked too toy-like for my taste. I needed corn to represent the agriculture in Minnesota accurately, but if you can pick something else, DO!

It depends

It depends on where and when you're trying to model. Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa generally have closer row spacing than Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas due to soil quality; the higher-growing states can hit above 200 bushels per acre, whereas places like Kansas will achieve "only" 130 bushels per acre. They're more closely planted than ever before. In the higher-yield areas, the stalks can be down to 15" rows (probably closer to 20"), whereas the lower-yield states will usually be between 20"-30" spacing. Individual plant spacing (within a row) will vary between 5"-10".

With today's computer-assisted planters, corn can be planted even closer than ever. Which era you model will correlate with how close the stalks are; while we can hit between 130-200 bu/acre now, 25-50 seemed to be about the norm through the 1950's.

Pre-1950, the majority of corn was planted by a team of horses, which means that compared to our modern 48-row planters, they could only really plant on 40" - 44" row spacings. I'm not sure what the plant spacings were, but I'd imagine them to be in the 10"-15" range.

How to make cheaper corn?

Anyone working on making scale corn in quantity for less cost? Could it be 3D printed in patches then some kind of foliage added to finish it off? .....DaveB

Try these

From Bluford Shops.  they make it in Summer Green and Autumn Harvest.

Packaged in regular and jumbo sizes.

Howard Garner 

Era?

Keep in mind that corn was planted further apart before the era of combines and still is in small patches that are hand harvested.

JTT Scenics makes the best scale corn there is. I always get compliments on my small victory garden filled with them.

They also make them in HO and O scale.

Season is important too

Remember, "knee high by the Fourth of July".

In Colorado, ours was usually a little higher than that, and really exploded over the next eight weeks, topping out at between 8 and 10 feet.  But then we had to irrigate it or it wouldn't grow at all.  I don't remember how many bushels per acre we got because it all went to feed our dairy cows.

If I remember right, our rows were 24" apart with the plants 12" apart in the rows.  

Scott Chatfield

Planting full rows or like puff balls: only the sides?

Not having had the need to create a field of corn on any of my modules, but it might be possible to keep the good looking (and expensive) stuff on the perimeter of the field and use cheaper, "good enough looking from above" stuff to fill the inside of the field. This is similar to planting an Appalachian mountain side forest: you put good looking trees on the outskirts of the forest while behind it (row 2.5-3) you swap to puff ball trees to fill in towards the back drop.

All I know is it is hell on airplanes!

If you have to do an emergency landing a corn field is a bad choice. The airplane is unlikely to survive!  Now there’s a way to save on scale model corn!  Have a crash landing scene with a small airplane that has demolished most of it!

The hail you say....

Easier way to model a demolished corn field: model the day after a hail storm.  Although one storm that hit our place only ruined about two acres in the middle of a 40 acre field.  Weird.

Scott Chatfield

of course....

Area 51 crop circles.....

Peace Bill

What kind of corn?

If you want to do seed corn, the field will look different once it grows as part of it will be cut off or detasseled.  We are waiting for our neighbor to plant his seed corn field next to our fence any day now as he alternates seed corn and beans.

Ken Vandevoort

Corn rows have narrowed over

Corn rows have narrowed over time.

Before advancements in herbicides pre 1950ish corn was ‘checked’ which planted corn at the same distance between rows and plants so that you could cultivate in two directions.  Such fields had a checkerboard pattern to them.  This was accomplished win a wire with bumps a set distance that would trip the planter to drop a seed.  I don’t know the exact row with but my guess is around 40 inches.

As herbicides came around and there wasn’t the need to cultivate as much, checking corn was dropped and spacing between plants within a row dropped.  Probably in the 1960s row widths started to decrease to 36 inches and in the 80s it went to 30 inches as the most common spacing.  This was a slow and gradual shift as farmers had to change their planter and combine heads or pickers at the same time.  In fact you could still find 36s today.

Narrow row (often 15. 20 or 22) picked up post 2000.  You probably see narrow rows the most north of route 80 or in corn silage production with large dairies.  

Populations push the mid 30,000’s in good soils and growing regions which puts plant spacing at around 6 inches within a row.  In poorer soils you’re more in the upper 20,000’s which puts spacing around 7.  Back in the day things were probably closer to the low or mid 20s, but rows were wider, putting more plants per row, so spacing was still around 7 inches.

I don’t know where and when your’e modeling, which will have a big effect.  If you want to get into the weeds I’ll look up some of my agricultural books and try to narrow down some of those changes over time.

PS.  Be sure to include end rows running the opposite direction of the field.  They are typically in the range of 2-4 planter passes, so anywhere from 12 to 48 rows for most planters.

Cornfields can go anywhere.

I have seen industrial parks with cornfields right up against the factories. You can put cornfields anywhere.

Thanks

I appreciate the wealth of information given. Gives me much information for my files.

@Mike Woods - good advice!

 Re: landing in a cornfield... but I know someone who did!

He was a skydiving center pilot... returning for another load of jumpers, but low on fuel.  He  thought  he'd have enough, but on final approach the engine died and he landed 400 feet short!

Ending: Wheels caught soft soil, the nose tipped in and he got a few facial bruises .. but the plane was out of service with an "unexpected engine stop" report. The FAA requires a Full Engine Breakdown, inspection, and rebuild.

It was a few months before the plane returned to service.

height

I used to hear "corn should be knee high by the 4th of July". But I guess nobody wants to model scraggly looking 2' tall corn. So, as fast as the stuff grows, a corn field almost limits your layout to a specific month of the year. Watch out for anachronisms!

Corn, Wheat, and Hops

I'm pretty much locked into a specific two or three week period by the crops on my layout, particularly the hops. Hops are generally harvested in the last week of August, first week of September around here in Oregon. 

I think the Busch corn is a bit on the short side, so I can believe it's still growing. 

Corn seasons

Corn isn't locked by a week or two in its growing cycle.

My layout takes place sometime in the mid to later summer, when corn normally isn't as tall as it is on my layout, but I have photos of real crops from other years where it is indeed that tall that time of year. 

Eastwind,

That's the old adage, but in IL, we're usually at full height by the 4th, if not tassled out completely. Of course, that's also because the corn strains we've been using in the last 30-40 years have been geared exclusively for this.

Corn growing

I decided to grow a little corn once, more or less for the heck of it. Looking at the seed envelope I realized it didn't have a growing season, but instead should be expected to mature x number of days after planting.

Seasonal height depends on your modeling year as well

When I farmed corn, lots of it, in the mid-late 70's, goal was the aforementioned "knee high by the 4th of July". ( BTW, we would typically be cutting wheat and putting up bales around the 4th. )

We would cut beans late August early September and move on to pick corn. Our  goal was all crops in, all fields plowed ( or whatever we did ) by Thanksgiving. Winter was for fixing whatever equipment we ( mostly me ) broke during harvest. I still remember removing fence posts over the winter with a bulldozer and a chain in the howling snow, but I digress. We did some late winter plowing/fieldwork and were generally planting after Easter , corn first, beans next.

As Juxen pointed out, more modern seed strains, mature earlier, I believe that would be beneficial for rain having a better chance to hit tassles in July as opposed to August. I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

Like Scott, we had some tall corn by end of season, but not due to irrigation, it was partially due to very ( for the time ) deep plowing.

In regard to modeling corn, most of the HO scale corn plants I see offered are 1". In HO scale that would represent 7.25 foot tall corn. So my railroad, on July 3rd in 1973, is gonna have some very tall corn. On the flip side, 2' tall corn, in HO, is going to be around 1/4" tall ( 0.276" ). Much of my static grass is that height, 7mm.

This thread has given me cause to look at some N scale corn, maybe it's about a half inch tall and might look more in scale...

JTT corn stalks

Sean,

Thanks for you recommendation of using JTT corn stalks. I order some and they are incredibly beautiful. Here in Indiana we raise a lot of soybeans and corn, therefore with my layout being in Indiana I need some cornfields.

I also love your field grass. I assume that it is static grass? What brand, color, and length did you use? I am having difficulty in finding the right color, it’s either to bright or just the wrong shade.

Again, thanks four help.

Greg

Joe,

My wife does (and did) a lot of the research corn at the U of Illinois in the last 10 years, and I had a 3-year stint in Ag, plus a lifetime of living in downstate IL. I used to get dragooned into picking some of the research fields by hand. The worst one was when it was sleeting on me in December. Of course, the research fields would try every type of corn, from tall tropical Hawaiian varieties to scrubby little bits of maize that grew to be 1' off the ground.

Most farmers here aim to plant around now (late April - late May, flooding contingent), resulting in full height (about 8') by the 4th of July. There's a few benefits to letting it mature so soon: the tassels can transmit pollen a little better before the August droughts, the corn ears have longer to mature, and, most importantly, it allows the corn to dry out in the fields, instead of using the farmer's dryer (which costs $ to run). This is also why the harvest still doesn't usually happen until mid-October or so, even though the corn plant has mostly died off a month beforehand.

If you think about it, corn usually spends about 1.5 months reaching full height, 2 months of being green and/or tasseled, and over 2 months dying off. Usually, when we think of corn, it's in the "green and tall" portion of its life, which only makes up about a third of its cycle.