Blue corn in Farmstead World — crop in the game, and what it is on a real farm.
Blue corn is a flint corn with a dark blue-black outer layer on each kernel, a colour from the same plant pigments that tint blueberries and red cabbage.
It is grown for food, not for feed or fuel: the grain is ground into flour or cooked with lime into masa for tortillas, a process that softens the hull and releases the corn’s niacin.
Grown in small acreage for buyers who pay for the variety and the colour, it earns several times what the same bushel would fetch as a commodity.
Farm facts about blue corn
Corn was domesticated by Indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte. (en.wikipedia.org)
Wild teosinte 'ears' hold just 5 to 10 seeds in stone-hard cases - nothing like a modern corncob. (en.wikipedia.org)
Teosinte seeds are armored so hard they can survive a trip through a grazing animal's gut - which helps the wild plant spread. (en.wikipedia.org)
Some corn varieties carry up to 20% of their DNA from a second teosinte species, picked up through natural cross-breeding over thousands of years. (en.wikipedia.org)
Teosinte weeds in Mexican corn fields evolved to mimic corn plants so farmers wouldn't pull them - a phenomenon called Vavilovian mimicry. (en.wikipedia.org)
The genus name Zea comes from a Greek word for a completely different grain - possibly spelt. (en.wikipedia.org)