Hello,
I was wondering if anyone here has worked with waxy corn before? If you have, what were your thoughts? I’m trying to decide if I want to start up a population next year, so I want to hear any pros and cons.
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I have been working to collect seeds for waxy corn from several different sources. I should have enough to send 40-50 seeds to several people later this winter if anyone is interested.
The waxy trait is caused by a single mutation, so I will try to integrate it into my flour or dent corn groups. I plan on growing the waxy next to a segregated block of detasseled flour/dent corn for two years. After the second season, I should be able to pick the half of the seeds with the waxy appearance out and use them for breeding.
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Hello, If anyone is interested in growing out waxy corn this summer please message me and I can send you some seed (40-50ish). I can send either a mix from all of the suppliers I found, or seed from just one supplier for you to grow out and confirm the genotype. My eyes are untrained, but for what its worth I did the iodine screening test to get rid of any corn that showed as just flint/flour varieties.
The waxy gene is recessive to both the normal flint/flour/pop phenotype and sweet corn phenotype, so it would probably be best to segregate the seed away from other varieties.
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What got you interested in waxy corn varieties? What are you hoping to use it for?
I had to look it up to see what it even was because I’d never heard of a waxy corn variety. It sounds interesting though. From the research in the '40s it seems like the corn would have been better to mix with the dent corn for increased feed conversion for livestock. Does it affect the other phenotypes negatively somehow?
I got interested in waxy corn for several reasons.
The first is that this variety of corn is used in a lot of southeast Asian cooking in place of sweet corn, and I cook a lot of this type of food so I thought it would be fun to try and be more authentic; It has more of a chewy texture similar to sushi rice.
The second is that you can mill this variety to make a gelling agent for cooking and that the starch is more digestible compared to typical corn.
The third is that this type of corn is typically locked behind corporate contracts and isn’t readily available for gardeners, this made it difficult to find and confirm legitimate sellers (A lot of etsy stores and importers). I figured I could try and develop a variety or two of it and share it with anyone else that is interested. Another option would be to see if any native owned seed companies would be interested in the new varieties; It wouldn’t be rematriation since the waxy phenotype was developed in Asia (as far as western history attributes it at least), but they might still be interested.
The fourth is just that it’s a novelty type of corn that most people haven’t heard of, similar to the amylomaize that produces mostly non-digestible/prebiotic starches.
From what I’ve seen mentioned as a negative is that it does slightly decrease the yield weight per kernel by ~2-7%, but this can be kind of reduced depending on the corn variety. Something that is a complaint for large scale farmers in producer contracts is that it dries a little slower than normal dent corn and makes delivery difficult, but I’m not too worried about that since this is just for myself.
An unexpected benefit is that this type of corn produces more ethanol when fermented compared to normal corn varieties, typically seeing a ~5% increase in efficiency. I don’t see myself trying to produce my own biofuels or making moonshine at the moment, but there’s always a possibility that in the future I take an interest.
Like you mentioned regarding the animal feed, there has been a bunch of research on using waxy corn for various livestock. I don’t remember the specifics, but I think they showed most animals preferred the normal dent over waxy corn if they had been raised on dent corn prior. I’ll have to reread everything because I don’t remember the specifics anymore.
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Those all sound like well thought out reasons for growing it!
I have a small meadow on our property that I could use to isolate it from my other corn. It’s far enough away with plenty of tree breaks (forest) in between as to discourage crossing.
I was going to plant barley in that field too, so those should be fine together. The corn can go on the north side to avoid shading anyone.
Would you want seed returned to you? If you’re working on a landrace I would imagine you might. 
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