The role of common milkweed in the lifecycle of the monarch butterfly has increased interest in the presence of this weed in the north central United States. An initial survey conducted in 1999 found that low densities of common milkweed occurred in approximately 50% of Iowa corn and soybean fields. In 2009, common milkweed was present in only 8% of surveyed fields, and the area within infested...

An experiment was carried out to determine the effect of corn silage particle size and fat supplements on performance, solid passage rate through the digestive tract, and chewing behavior in dairy cows. The forages were coarse or fine corn silage with geometric means of 8.8±2.7 and 5.6±2.8 mm, and alfalfa with geometrics means of 7.0±3.3 mm, and fat supplements were neutral fat (palm) and soy-o...

Corn is a common crop which is often studied in the applications of remote sensing and precision agriculture. In both cases, it is important to know the geometrical structure of the corn, for example, the diameter and height of stem, the leaf areas and leaf directions. It is convenient to measure these geometrical structural data on a 3D corn model. In order to generate such a corn 3D model, an...

The food industry has long known that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in the most delightful way." And cane sugar had been America's most delightful sweetener of choice, that is, until the 1970s, when the much less expensive corn-derived sweeteners like maltodextrin and high-fructose corn syrup were developed. While regular table sugar (sucrose) is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, ...

Fumonisins are well known mycotoxins produced by Fusarium verticillioides, F. proliferatum and other Fusarium species. Many new fumonisins and fumonisin-like compounds have been detected by mass spectrometry in cultures of F. verticillioides. Recently, fumonisins B(2) and B(4) were produced by Aspergillus niger isolated from coffee and fumonisin B(2) in A. niger from grapes. Fumonisin B(2) was ...

The rising prevalence of allergic disease in the last decades is unexplained. However, it has been postulated that the widespread introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods since 1996 may play a role in this evolving allergic disease epidemic. Currently, the most common GM plant is the genetically engineered Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)-corn. This transgene confers resistance against corn b...

NCH 4 Revised April 1993 Despite signifi cant progress made over the years, disease is still a major factor limiting corn production in the U.S. Estimates of annual yield losses in corn due to disease range from 7 to 20 percent nationally (Shurtleff, 1980). Using a 12 percent average, that’s nearly 1 billion bushels. Without the development of new hybrids, the losses would easily be more than d...