This week’s cover story was born, in a sense, when writer Hugh Dellios spent a summer during his college years supervising a seed-corn detasseling crew at the Pabst Farms in Oconomowoc, Wis.
He could not imagine then, as he marveled at the mile-long cornfields, what kind of hybrids were being created or that, as a journalist decades later, he would find himself in a cornfield in western China, wondering how the Heartland had taken hold so far away. He spent 10 years as a Tribune foreign correspondent, and on his last assignment, in Mexico, he witnessed the peculiar dance between the U.S. and Mexico over the genetic modification of corn.
But the story also owes its genesis to Tribune photographer Abel Uribe, who had been working independently to document the ancient corn-planting methods that were dying out in the Mexican village where he was raised.
By the time Abel and Hugh got together, Hugh had returned to Chicago and to his new post as Tribune foreign editor. But he continued to work on the story, waking up when the roosters crowed to write for a few hours before heading to work.
“Now I have a much wider perspective, and a desire to explain how this plant has worked its way into so many corners of the globe,” Hugh observes. “It also places me right in the center of the Midwest’s enormous agricultural engine so I could better understand what is driving this push to make corn into fuel and so many other things.”
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etaylor@tribune.com
Home on the Range will be back on the range soon.
