By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

TRENTON, Ohio — It’s an “a-maize-ing” stalk bearing nine – that’s right, nine – ears of corn.

The stalk is growing on Steve and Lynette Beiser’s Ohio farm. “I’m not an agronomist, but I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Steve Beiser said.

Neither has Butler County agriculture agent Steve Bartels, who sent photos to the Ohio State University field office in Wooster to see if the plant can be studied. The cornstalk is not growing in a field, but next to a concrete wall near where Beiser mixes his feed. Of the nine ears on the stalk, five have developed grain.

“When I mix feed, I dump corn into the wagon,” Beiser said. “Probably a grain bounced out and landed on this wall and grew on its own. It’s had no insecticide, no fertilizer, nothing.”

This corn plant is triple-stacked Roundup Ready corn, Beiser said.
“It will shoot more brace roots,” he said. “That’s supposed to be the strength of the plant. It even braced itself on the cement. I’m putting somewhere between $400 and $500 an acre in corn to grow corn, and here one pops out of a wagon, grows on its own and shoots nine ears.

“I’d like a few answers why a kernel out of the grain bin that bounced out of the wagon and had no special care is capable of shooting nine ears.”

“It is amazing to me that the stalk is growing where it is,” Bartels said. “It is a good, strong, healthy stock in that location; it hasn’t had a good place to grow, it hasn’t had good soil. It’s kind of incredible that it is growing there and doing what it is doing.”

He sent a photo to Peter Thomison, an OSU extension agronomist. Thomison replied:

“According to How a Corn Plant Develops, an ear shoot (potential ear) will develop from every aboveground node except the last six to eight nodes below the tassel. However, anatomical studies indicate that there are as many potential ears as there are leaves on a corn plant, since every node has an auxiliary bud (sometimes referred to as an ear initial) associated with it and these auxiliary buds can, in theory, give rise to ear shoots.

“We typically don’t see more than one ear developing on a corn plant due to competition between plants in a field for light, water and nutrients.”

The plant was produced by hybrids and happened to germinate on its own, Bartels said. Normally that seed would not carry the good characteristics of either of its parents.

“Since this has done better than the parent stock, my question was whether we could take some of those grains and study them and find some gene in there,” he said.

The stalk has created interest and many farmers have come to see it. All are amazed. Beiser has invited seed companies to look at the plant.

“They’re excited, but I can’t get a pathologist to tear it apart and tell us what the genes or strains are, nobody wants to do that,” he said.

Lynnette Beiser even investigated the Guinness World Records online. She hit a brick wall.

“I filled out the application and at the end, it said they needed my credit card because the registration fee was either $600 or $700, and I would have to pay all the costs involved in flying representatives out and back, their lodging and meals so they could come to verify that we did indeed have this stalk of corn,” she said.

While the stalk did well during the early part of the drought, is has since withered.