01/05/2007  Squirreling around - It’s always good to learn new things, and what I learned recently is that corn has a “good part” and a not so good part.  At least according to the squirrels.

It all starts off in a seemingly normal activity.  Feeding the squirrels.  The kids like to see them, so we have one of the little squirrel-sized chairs attached to the tree where you can put an ear of corn for the squirrels to eat. 

It doesn’t take the squirrels long to figure out there is a free meal available and soon after putting the first couple ears out, the squirrels would come by and eat all the kernels of corn. 

At least that’s what I thought they were doing, in actuality, the little rodents were only eating part of the kernel. 

I noticed this about the time I was putting out my third or fourth ear of corn that there appeared to be a lot of little pieces of kernel on the ground.  Closer inspection showed that most of the kernels had one little bit taken out of them. 

This was interesting.  Obviously the squirrels were just taking one bite and throwing the rest away.   

As I was pretty busy at the moment, I didn’t give it much more thought, but a few days later I started thinking about it again.

So, I took a kernel of corn and with my pocket knife, soon found that it was easiest to cut away everything but the little center part that the squirrels were eating.

This part it soon became obvious was the germ of the plant.

The next step in my research was to eat it.  It was fairly soft and of course tasted like corn. 

Then I cut away the germ from a kernel and tried eating the rest.  It was very hard and had little flavor. 

I figured the squirrels had something here, so a little research was in order.

The germ is the only living part of the corn kernel. The germ contains the essential genetic information, enzymes, vitamins and minerals for the kernel to grow into a corn plant. About 25 percent of the germ is corn oil—the most valuable part of the kernel, which is high in polyunsaturated fats and has a mild taste.

I found that if you neglect to put out a fresh ear every day or two, the squirrels would eventually come back and eat the rest of the kernel.

There is a hard pericarp covering the rest of the kernel, most of which is starch (full of energy).   

So it was interesting to see that squirrels in an abundance of food would pick out that best part. 

I haven’t seen it on the grocery store shelves (I haven’t even looked I guess), but there is supposed to be a small amount of corn germ being extracted for specific foods on the market.

“The extracted germ cake can be ground and dried to yield a high quality food grade corn germ flour which is high in protein and is an excellent source of minerals. Corn germ flour is available on a limited basis for consumer food products.” 

While on corn, I was thinking about ethanol production.  Again, a little research (some a year or two old), found that we produce 9 billion bushels of corn.

If it was all converted to ethanol (at 2.5 gallons per bushel)…

Then we would have 22.5 billion gallons of ethanol.

We use 130 billion gallons of gas a year. 

Thus the entire corn crop (kernel) could supply only about 17% of our fuel needs (for the year) if made into ethanol.

 It also appears that if we could switch all our cultivated land to switchgrass (a perennial crop) and get ethanol from this, we would yield 128 billion gallons (pretty close to current fuel demands).

 Not complaining about anything, just playing with numbers.  It just goes to show the almost mind numbing numbers that constitute our energy needs, and the work and resources that will need to be developed as we move into the future.