jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

How much is corn on the cob in your area? I won't pay $0.50 for an ear of corn. It was on sale last week - 4/$1.00, so I bought eight. Not great corn, though. There is a local discussion online about the price. A guy said he stopped at a farm stand and was surprised that it cost him $8.00 for four ears. Other people paid $0.79 and $1.30 per ear.

Ethanol is great for the corn farmers and some others, but it's not good for the people.

Larryshuman

I've seen butter at $7.99 per pound.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

And that just adds to the cost of eating corn. It's $3.98/lb here.

traderjohn Loc: New York City

[quote=jerryc41]How much is corn on the cob in your area? I won't pay $0.50 for an ear of corn. It was on sale last week - 4/$1.00, so I bought eight. Not great corn, though. There is a local discussion online about the price. A guy said he stopped at a farm stand and was surprised that it cost him $8.00 for four ears. Other people paid $0.79 and $1.30 per ear.

Ethanol is great for the corn farmers and some others, but it's not good for the people.[/quot

JustJill Loc: Iowa

Here in Iowa, it changes throughout the season, at my farmers's anyway. And then it depends on the vendor and whether it is organic or not. It can be as cheap at 4/$1.00 or $1 for one.
What I would like to find.... and I will pay for it, is plain yellow corn and not the bicolor ears.

sb Loc: Florida's East Coast

I got some the other day that was 5 for $2 - a few days before it was $ .50 at Walmart - but it was pretty decent corn. I don't like paying that much, but this is the best time of year to find decent corn, so what are ya gonna do? We can afford to eat decent food - but I would hate to be trying to feed a large family these days. I would be trying to find a lot of creative ways to make rice and beans (the price of which has also gone way up - even rice is now $2 a pound!).

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

What's not going up?

Seasonal stuff usually is more of a sticker shock.
The other stuff goes up more gradually throughout the year.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

For some reason, bags of frozen corn haven't gone way up in price - not yet.

"...decent food..." That reminds me. I have to check on the Flavors of the Week at Stewart's.

All ice cream is $3.39 for a half gallon!

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

When were they initially frozen (packaged)? Before the increase?

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Corn on the cob has been $0.50/ear for years. If the cost to the store rises, they raise the price of stock on hand. We don't get a break. Frozen corn is about $2.00/lb - and that's all corn - no cob.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I'll have to ask my wife, she does the shopping these days. I used to do it when I could get around prior to 2019.

The season is ending here but we have good local corn as we live in a semi-rural / semisuburban area of California. Soon we will be getting corn from South America and it will be rather dated and less sweet.

There are varieties of corn grown for animal feed and grown for ethanol production. Likely is not as tasty to eat. And I am sure prices vary by variety too. Virtually all food is high priced right now.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

We have lots of corn fields around here - although not as much as we used to have - but the price is higher than in the supermarket. I thought it would be the opposite.

JustJill Loc: Iowa

Growing the corn for animal feed reminds me of a story.
During WWII there was a POW camp in Algona IA. The Germans were served sweet corn for a meal and the prisoners refused to eat it because they though they were being served "corn for swine." Sweet corn was not familiar to them.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

That's funny - and totally believable. Similarly, lobster was considered a second class food among the early colonists. They served it to prisoners.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I retired, there were basically 3 types of corn: Sweet Corn (for human consumption); Feed Corn (for animal consumption); and Grain Corn (for processing into ethanol or high fructose corn syrup).

Sweet corn was further divided into 3 types: Conventional (old style corn); Sugar Enhanced (genetically improved); and SuperSweet (further genetically improved). The Conventional corn was the kind your grandfather ate: the sugar started to disappear within an hour of picking so you got the freshest corn you could and ate it all immediately. Sugar Enhanced would last a couple days before losing sweetness. SuperSweet would hold for a week, and became the primary variety that was shipped to supermarkets because it lasted. SuperSweet corn had some disadvantages: it was a little tougher (but not much), unless it was within range of a different type, in which case it was much tougher. The range was variously reported to be between a quarter mile to a mile, so you had to know what your neighbor was planting. Since it was a pollination problem, you could separate the fields by time as well as distance since the pollination of corn is only about a week long.

Further, different varieties of corn were developed to fit various markets. Fast-developing corn ripened early to please the people who wanted the first corn of the season. IMHO, the best tasting varieties had fairly long development times (70-90 days from seed to harvest) and in the mid-atlantic region ripened in August through early September.

Corn takes a large area to grow, since it's wind pollinated (primarily) and small patches of corn generally have poor kernel filling due to limited pollination. I didn't have enough available field to grow corn so I bought it from a local farmer who did. He would try different varieties every year and picked the ones that filled his needs. His needs didn't always coincide with my taste buds, and there were some varieties that I really didn't like (e.g. corn that was grown for both sweet corn and cornstalks in the fall). The field life of a block of corn is 3-5 days, after which the kernels start to get too large and lose taste. So you have to plant two blocks of corn a week, adjusting your planting for the time to harvest. And the published time to harvest for a given variety is an average, which depends on the environment (rainfall, temperature, etc.) so sometimes blocks would double up and sometimes there would be production gaps.