Corn History and Culture Book in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2019 AACCI Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Corn (Zea mays L.) began its journey about 10,000years ago at someplace in Mesoamerica and is greatly responsible for the initiation of formal agriculture and establishment of primitive societies. The ancient farmers started to select and manipulate the ancestors of this grain and developed and domesticated the corn we know today. Amazingly in a couple of centuries, the native Mesoamericans transformed the ancestors of corn into several pre-Columbian primitive corn races, which still constitutes the genetic background for the production of high-yielding open-pollinated varieties and hybrids, transgenic, and the array of specialty types such as popcorn, sweet, pigmented, and quality protein maize. Today, this food crop which encodes high-value genetic information and great adaptation to different ecosystems is the most relevant cereal in the planet with annual production exceeding 1 billion metric tons. After the discovery of the Americas, corn quickly disseminated into Europe, Asia, and Africa, where it is also widely planted and used. From the utilization viewpoint, corn is used as staple in many regions of the globe, broadly used as animal feed and recently gained importance as industrial feedstock for production of biofuels, chemical compounds, pseudo-plastics, and other materials. This chapter reviews the origin and cultivation of corn and the role of this cultivar in the actual global agriculture. In addition, the history of corn and its importance is discussed.

publication date

  • January 1, 2018