Grain for Citified Dummies

Harvesting corn

Television sitcoms like to make fun of rural people, probably because most comedy writers are city boys and girls whose raging inferiority complexes mean they desperately need someone to mock, which may be why there are so many sitcom references to cow-tipping. Of course, those who grew up on farms have knowledge that city and suburban kids lack, which is why it makes no sense for someone who's never touched a tractor or thinks a "combine" is some kind of business organization to teach people about agriculture. That, however, is precisely what eHow's Marie Mulrooney tried to do the day she penned "How to Convert Bushels of Corn to Tons."¹

Mulrooney managed to confuse the issue – and reach Demand Media's minimum word count – by babbling about the difference between the ton and the metric ton, managing to insert all the different terms "ton," "tonne," "short ton," "metric ton" and "long ton." Blah, blah, blah. She does all her conversions by informing her readers that,

"The U.S. Grains Council says that a bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds" and then going into excruciating detail about the necessary conversion factors. Yawwwnnnn.... That should have taken her all of fifty words at most (she barely met DMS's minimum word count at 301 words).  Mulrooney almost stumbles onto an important point in her conversion lesson when she (inappropriately, we point out) tells her readers to "Determine the density of a bushel of corn depending on which type of ton you want in your end result..."

At which point we were scratching her heads: "Determine the density... depending on..."? and this means what, exactly? We started this post out by reminding our readers that farm kids know stuff city kids don't, and here's one of those things: when you pull up to the neighborhood grain elevator with a load of corn to be weighed, the attendant sticks a big old probe into the middle of your load to take a reading. Farm kids know that this is to determine the moisture content of the grain, because any variation in moisture effects the density of the corn and therefore its weight per bushel. And if you city kids didn't know it, corn is priced by the bushel. 

Simply put, a bushel of corn doesn't weigh 56 pounds. It only weighs 56 pounds if the moisture content is precisely 15.5%. If the moisture content rises to 17%, the same bushel of corn weighs slightly more than 57 pounds. Bring in a truck loaded with 20 tons (40,000 pounds) of corn, and the difference between those two benchmarks is 12.65 bushels; about $50 at $4.00/bushel. 

It makes a difference, a difference that means nothing to the average suburban fifth grader, but means a heckuva lot to ag students in Iowa and Illinois. We think that when someone like Marie Mulrooney doesn't know what she's talking about, she shouldn't answer the question. She did, though, and that's why she's our Dumbass of the Day again.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was ehow.com/how_8684634_convert-bushels-corn-tons.html

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