Crop Comments: Chickens May Prefer Non-GMO Corn

Up till a decade and a half ago I served as an advisor to the high school vocational ag program in Milford, NY, which was part of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES). This ag program was physically centered in a barn which housed goats, sheep, layer hens, rabbits, pigs, dairy heifers, light horses and one cat (none of these animals required milking).

There were also some semi-domesticated white-tailed deer (whose status was closely monitored by New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation). Deer enjoyed their own annex to that barn. All of the school’s animal residents were offered minerals plus a general-purpose grist manufactured by a nearby feed mill, and plenty of hay sold by nearby farmers. (No hay was grown at the school’s farm.)

While in a creative mindset there, I conducted an experiment, testing the ability of poultry to intelligently select from different types of hybrid corn. I got two nearby farmers to donate whole ears of corn: one lot of corn was genetically modified to survive glyphosate herbicide applications. The other lot of hybrid corn was certified organic. Before I delve into my experiment’s details, I want to provide a new definition to the term “bird brain” – then let me explain how a very special heirloom corn variety was rescued from extinction.

According to neuroscience researchers at Vanderbilt University, “for a long time, having a ‘bird brain’ was considered to be a bad thing; now it turns out that it should be a compliment. A new study suggests an answer to a puzzle that comparative neuro-anatomists have been wrestling with for more than a decade: how can birds with their small brains perform cognitive behaviors?”

Those researchers referred to studies “that directly compared the cognitive abilities of parrots and crows to those of primates. The studies found that the birds could manufacture and use tools, use insight to solve problems, make inferences about cause-effect relationships, recognize themselves in a mirror and plan for future needs, among other cognitive skills previously considered the exclusive domain of primates.”

The heirloom corn variety I encountered was in an online article titled “This corn was down to its last two cobs. Now it could help farmers grow food in the climate crisis” (by Jeremy Harlan, published Nov. 18, 2023 by CNN). Harlan wrote that with 2018’s Hurricane Florence promising destruction on Campbell Coxe’s farm in South Carolina, this grain farmer had to decide which of his family’s crops he was going to save. According to Harlan, Coxe chose the Jimmy Red corn, an heirloom open-pollinated crop that generations of moonshiners knew for its nutty, sweet flavor and high oil content. But scientists also knew it as one of a few plants that could help society grow food amid the climate crisis, as temperatures get hotter, fresh water becomes scarcer and storms get stronger.

Harlan explained that Coxe frantically picked corn around the clock, gathering his 50 precious acres of Jimmy Red, just before the hurricane hit, destroying his remaining crops.

Jimmy Red had dodged becoming nothing more than a memory 10 years earlier. Harlan detailed that in September 2008, Ted Chewning, a farmer and heirloom seed collector, would show folks two ears of the bloodred corn. According to Chewning, “I was fascinated by it. It was a beautiful corn on the cob.” But not only that: they were the last two ears of Jimmy Red.

A local moonshiner, the last known grower of Jimmy Red corn, had just passed away, and his family no longer wanted to grow corn for whiskey distilling. The moonshiner’s family gave the two ears to Chewning, believing he could use them for the best purpose possible. “I held onto it through the winter, saved one ear and planted the seeds from the second (ear) in the spring,” said Chewning. Years later, scientists realized that Chewning likely saved Jimmy Red from extinction, and with it, a genetic code that may help commercial corn growers combat rapidly changing climate.

According to Brian Ward, Ph.D., research scientist at Clemson University, “The world is going to have to grow more food on half the land with half the resources. The genes in heirloom corn can help us do that.”

He explained that Jimmy Red dwindled because it’s not the kind of corn that is edible straight off the cob. It must be dehydrated to extract its flavor and high oil content – ideal for making moonshine, but not valu- able for large commercial farming. Ward stressed that its value is in its genetics: “Heirloom grains and fruits have developed traits that make them less vulnerable to climate change, because they have grown over hundreds of years in wildly different conditions. Those traits can be used to breed cultivars that will withstand harsher growing environments. An heirloom may have that gene that can produce well in extreme conditions.”

Returning to the Milford menagerie, and what turned out to be selectively finicky fowls: I introduced the 30 or so hens, all belonging to this diversely pigmented flock, to their new corn cuisine options – one pile of organic corn and one pile of non-organic corn. At that time there was 90% – 95% certainty that the non-organic corn was genetically modified to tolerate at least one herbicide, also possibly carrying manmade genes to fight insects. The following morning, all that remained of the organic corn was bare cobs. The non-organic corn was virtually intact.

Some hens had begun eating non-organic kernels, while even more hens started eating organic cobs. The Vanderbilt scientists credited birds with being able to “use insight to solve problems [and] make inferences about cause-effect relationships.” Were the hens rejecting the pesticide residue in the non-organic corn, or the modified genes themselves, or both?

We’re pretty certain that the BOCES birds knew nothing about the Vanderbilt avian research being conducted nearly 1,000 miles to the southwest.

by Paris Reidhead