Now the sunburnt men
And the sweating horses
Go out in the breathless morn,
Turn again and again
As the slow shares furrow
The bright brittle blades of corn.
~ Maud Elfrid Uschold, ‘Corn’
photo: heat almost drips from an August 2006 morning sunrise in corn country even though it really does feel nice and cool at about 90°F at this point of the day, just a stones-throw from the Mississippi River in Illinois, a state that produces millions of acres of corn, so much so the ‘corn sweat’ – an evaporative cooling process that releases daily as much as several thousand gallons of water per acre – impacts regional weather and also contributes to excessively high heat and humidity.