It’s Not Your Grandad’s Corn

Claire got a message from Mike and Sue who were apparently driving through or by a corn field. I guess that inspired them to wonder how high the corn should be since it’s getting close to the 4th of July. Naturally they asked that Claire pass the question along to me — the smart uncle.

There are a lot of “old adages” that have been passed down through generations. One of those old adages that is still in circulation today is that corn should be “knee high by the Fourth of July.” Besides being kind of a cool rhyme, it was probably somewhat accurate at the time the phrase was coined — probably back in colonial times. Actually there is really no clear explanation as to where, when (or why) the rhyme got started.

When I was growing up a lot of the farmers around Maysville grew corn, even though the “next town over” was considered the broomcorn capital of the world. (You can check the archives of this blog if you don’t know what broomcorn is…) But I remember corn being about 18 to 24 inches high by around the first of July. So “knee high” was probably pretty accurate. However I noticed driving around Shepherdstown this week that all the corn was a lot higher than ‘knee high.”

There’s actually a good scientific reason for this — back when I lived in Maysville, if the corn crop had gotten as high as you knees by the 4th, it meant that the crop was doing well, and the farmers could plan on a good harvest. But today, the corn farmers plant isn’t like the corn the farmers around Maysville planted. The genetics of corn have improved tremendously in the past 70 or 80 years. Corn (and other crops) is much more stress tolerant. That toughness has allowed the corn to be planted earlier in the spring — sometimes it I can even be planted in less than ideal conditions.
So because of the improvements made to the corn, if the crop is only knee high by the 4th of July, that’s not a good sign — it’s a bad sign.

I think the knee high phrase is still popular, but the phrase “corn as high as an elephant’s eye” may be more accurate today. (The elephant’s eye phrase originated in the Oklahoma musical as part of the lyrics from “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye and it looks like it’s climbing up to the sky.) To put this in perspective for you, according to Google, the average size of an elephant is 10 feet tall. So today, a corn stalk’s growing success is held to a much different standard.

While I was doing my extensive research for this blog, I ran across one theory that claimed that the “knee high” rhyme came about during colonial times and meant knee high by the 4th of July to a man sitting on a horse. Of course this begs the question, how tall of a horse? I think horses are measured in “hands” so that complicates things even more.

So today, knee high by the fourth of July isn’t a good thing but it’s got a nice ring to it and it’s fun to say.
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