The Value of Corn: Diverse Products and Uses

A visit to an exhibition devoted to maize quickly reveals how valuable this crop is. There you encounter a whole new world of maize-based products that many people never knew existed.

These products include corn bread and canned corn, cakes and chocolate, corn flakes and popcorn, corn oil and beverages, candies and medicines — in short, everything the maize plant yields, and which this article only touches on briefly.

It is worth noting that exhibitions present mainly food products, and only to a limited extent pharmaceuticals derived from maize.

What is the value of maize, expressed in figures?

The value of maize becomes clear from a few simple numbers. Every tonne of maize grain yields 672 kg of molasses, plus 25 kg of fine oil, plus another 273 kg of dry feed. Converted into sugar, that molasses means almost 2.5 tonnes of glucose can be obtained from every hectare of a maize field.

Maize molasses and glucose also have an economic edge: their cost is lower than that of the same products made from potatoes.

A second calculation tells a similar story. From one tonne of grain it is possible to produce 780 kg of maize flour, plus 150 kg of groats, plus 70 kg of bran (the seed coats).

Maize flour does more than serve baking. As already noted, it lets the brewing industry cut its consumption of barley, and that alone promises substantial monetary savings. People once said of buckwheat porridge that it praises itself; the same can now be said of maize.

Production of maize-based food in this country is set to keep expanding. Both consumers directly and many branches of the food industry have a stake in these products.

The confectionery industry is a clear example. Its need for molasses to make caramel, sweets and other confections exceeds 200,000 tonnes a year. For clarity, output of a given product is usually compared with pre-war or pre-revolutionary figures.

For glucose, a comparison with 1913 is simply impossible, because tsarist Russia did not produce it at all. Against 1940, when only 629 tonnes of crystalline glucose were made, output of this highly valuable dietary product rose 54-fold.

Breakfast cereals — corn flakes and puffed corn — cannot be set against pre-war figures either. Compared with 1950, production of these items grew 17-fold over ten years.

Which plants processed maize, and how much could they handle?

Maize processing in the Soviet Union began on a large scale as early as the start of the 1930s, when the buildings of the Beslan Maize Combine rose at the foothills of the Caucasus range in Soviet Ossetia. The Beslan combine was one of the first-born of the First Five-Year Plan — a contemporary of the famed Dneproges hydroelectric station, the renowned Magnitka, and other landmark construction projects of that period.

This was the largest maize-processing enterprise in Europe. Each day its shops processed more than 500 tonnes of maize grain, turning out starch and molasses, glucose and oil, hydrol and feed, and other valuable products.

If the Beslan combine was the first-born of the First Five-Year Plan, the first-born of the Seven-Year Plan was another enterprise — the Verkhnedneprovsk Starch and Molasses Combine in Ukraine. The first stage of this combine came on stream in 1960, and once construction was complete its raw-material capacity was to reach 450 tonnes of maize per day.

Each day the shops of the Verkhnedneprovsk combine turned out 250 tonnes of caramel molasses, 25 tonnes of crystalline glucose, 50 tonnes of dry starch, 14 tonnes of oil from the germ, 11 tonnes of corn steep extract and other products. Construction of new maize-processing enterprises was due to begin in 1963.

By then maize had ceased to be a southern crop alone. It reached Siberia; maize was even sown near Chita. It is therefore no surprise that new starch-and-molasses combines were planned not only for the south and centre of Russia — in Kropotkin, Kherson and Voronezh — but also in distant Siberia, at Krasnoyarsk.

The construction of new plants went hand in hand with an expanding raw-material base and a year-on-year rise in maize-grain production. In 1962, for instance, the area under maize was 10 million hectares larger than in 1961.

The point, however, was not only the increase in sown area. Higher yields mattered more — perhaps decisively — for raising maize-grain output. The use of high-yielding hybrids, the application in farming practice of modern chemistry and agronomy, combined with the dedicated labour of collective-farm maize growers, was expected to bring large harvests within the coming years.

Considerable achievements in this field already existed at the time. Far beyond the countries of the CIS, the name of the celebrated maize grower and twice Hero of Socialist Labour Y. A. Dolinyuk was known — she obtained 207 centners of dry grain from every hectare of her field. Many new and illustrious names became known during those historic years as well.

The experience of the outstanding maize-grower mechanizers — twice Hero of Socialist Labour V. V. Gitalov and Hero of Socialist Labour N. F. Manukovsky, pioneers of fully mechanized maize cultivation without manual labour — spread widely across the country.

In 1961 Gitalov's brigade gathered 75 centners of grain per hectare over an area of 429 hectares. Gitalov described his achievements at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU. In the Kuban, the team of V. Y. Pervitsky from the experimental farm of the Kuban Research Institute for Testing Tractors and Agricultural Machinery achieved a yield of 50 centners of grain per hectare in 1960.

Most importantly, the labour input per centner of grain in Pervitsky's team came to only 11 person-minutes. In 1961 Pervitsky lowered it further, to 9 person-minutes per centner of grain. The successes of leading maize growers made it possible, within the next year or two, to obtain a significant quantity of maize grain of various varieties and botanical kinds.

This in turn allowed a decisive rise in the output of livestock products — meat, milk, butter — and at the same time an increase in the supply of the valuable, nourishing products obtained from the industrial processing of maize. There is little doubt that the remarkable exhibits seen at the exhibition would appear in sufficient quantity on the shelves of grocery stores and on consumers' tables.

In this way maize made its own contribution to creating an abundance of food in the country.