That whole corn/wheat thing has always driven me crazy.
You know – how Brits call wheat “corn,” and we call wheat “wheat.” But to a Brit, we call corn “wheat.”
This used to confuse me when I was a kid and often went to the UK to visit my relatives there. They thought we grew a lot of corn in Saskatchewan. I would correct them that we in fact grew almost no corn but did grow huge amounts of wheat. And we’d thoroughly confuse each other and find each other slightly annoying.
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The same thing would happen whenever anyone talked about “canoes” and “kayaks.” What we Canucks see as a canoe is what they call a “kayak,” and what we see as a “kayak” they call a canoe. As a cocky colonial I always assumed I was right and they were old-world-wrong.
The corn/wheat thing came back again in university, when I was studying British history, and the matter of the “corn laws” came up again and again. Because of my history as an annoying Canadian cousin to a British family, I was able to breezily inform my fellow history students at the University of Regina that “corn refers to wheat.” At the time, somehow this seemed to give me an aura of knowledgeableness that gave me an edge. Or perhaps just made me seem a bit crazy and intense. Either way, it had some utility at the time.
Now the whole corn/wheat interchangeability issue has come back to me, but in a more tangible way. Corn, the dominant U.S. crop, is steaming towards the Prairies with frightening speed, threatening to ram its way deep into traditional wheat territory. This has been a distant story for us for a few years, with U.S. wheat acreage shrinking as corn gets bred to fit into the dry and short-season areas wheat used to rule over. And it’s been a story for me here in southern Manitoba as eager farmers jump on short-season corn varieties and have been switching hundreds of thousands of acres from wheat and other cereals like oats into corn.
And variety development has just begun. Quite a few companies have been developing Prairie-tough corn varieties for the past decade and the commitment to spread corn wide from Winnipeg to the Rockies is getting undeniable. Monsanto’s announcement recently that it was putting $100 million into Prairie corn variety development showed that those hardnosed folks think there’s a big opportunity to exploit. Pretty soon, as it is in Manitoba’s Red River valley now, seeing lots of corn beside wheat – or instead of wheat – will probably become pretty common up on the western plains.
What happens when high-yield corn competes head-to-head with flat-yield wheat? That’s something I explored last month when I was down in eastern North Dakota and Minnesota with some farmers and with the North Dakota Farm Bureau. Right now I’m wading through those hours of interviews and writing features about it for our newspaper. I’m hoping to provide a portrait of a region in which wheat has been mostly wiped-out by corn, but in which there are still wheat acres, but only for special circumstances. What happens when corn comes a-calling? That’s what I’m trying to explore.
But I’m glad I don’t have to write this for a British newspaper. Flipping back and forth between “corn” and “wheat” and remembering to invert the terms every time I mentioned the crops would be intensely error-risky, and would be most annoying – as I was as a Canadian cousin from corn/wheat country to long-suffering British relatives.
