Disgusting

Anyone who has made the mistake of picking up a maize/corn cob on a field (which is allowed after machines have harvested the fields) and then tried cooking and eating it will probably never forget the experience. 99% of all the stuff around here is "feed maize" destined for cattle feed silage or for use in biogas units to make "renewable" electricity.

I hate the stuff and can't, like Brexit, think of one good reason for its existence. Don't get me wrong, I like sweetcorn and often use corn starch in cooking but those are very different plants.

The wholescale change in the summer landscape from mixed fields of cereal, rape etc to the monoculture forests of maize looks awful. The fields support little or no wildlife except wild boar which have become a pest as a result. The seed market is heavily controlled by the likes of Monsanto so that only their plants work in combination with high use of their pesticides and herbicides such as glyphosate damaging our flying & crawling insects beyond any reasonable level. The plants are huge users of artificial fertilizers, do nothing to improve the soil structure & natural worm population. The hunger of the biogas units developed & subsidised by us taxpayers 20 years ago with very high electricity prices, acceptable to get renewable energy, but conceived to use waste in their reactors are now almost exclusively using maize planted for this purpose and driving up land prices, forcing ordinary cereal and especially dairy farmers to hang their coats on the nail. Then we have ever-bigger, heavier equipment compacting the soil which can't recover because the worm population is being killed off with the excessive sprays & fertilizers. And in drier regions, maize is a huge consumer of water, reducing our groundwater levels dramatically even in big rivers like the Rhine where the plants are regularly watered throughout the summer.

If I was a politician I would ban the stuff. At least the harvesting has almost finished, and we are getting back our countryside.