 I'm Marissa Kruthop-Bredinbaugh and I did a SAIR research project on growing sweet corn. I studied sustainable agriculture as a bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and my professors did a lot of research during their time there and then they always encouraged us to do other things outside of our education in the classroom. And my mom sent me a link to a SAIR grant and she said, I think you should do it and your professor can help you write it because she's written lots of grants. And so I said, okay, so I went and talked to my professor and I was like, but I don't even know what my project would be. And she said, well, you do have a vegetable CSA. What is a problem that you have noticed on your farm? So then I said, well, our silver queen corn always gets smut, the fungus that grows on the corn. And I said, it's a real problem because people like white corn and that's the most popular variety, but it gets a pretty high rate of fungus on it. And so she said, well, test that. And so then I was always interested in heirloom. So then I decided to test heirloom and she helped me draw up like a cross table, cross examination table to test like the two different variables, the hybrid heirloom and the conventional organic. And then I wrote it and submitted it. I was comparing two different variables. I compared heirloom versus hybrid and I also compared organic versus conventional. So I had three types of corn that were hybrids that were traditionally grown. So I had a yellow, a white and a bicolor. And then I had three hybrid varieties, a white, a yellow and a colored variety. I used a blue corn, blue jade was the variety. And then I grew all six of those varieties conventionally. And then I grew all six of those varieties organically. The organic plot was not certified organic because the land was not three years organic, which is at the time the regulations for being organic in Ohio. But all the practices that we implemented on that plot that year were organic. Then I compared to field notes and compared for growing practicality and how I was satisfied with the results of the corn and how they turned out. And then I gave consumers from my CSA blind surveys and they told me how they liked type A corn versus type E corn. And then I knew which type was organic or conventional hybrid or heirloom. And obviously some people knew the blue jade was the heirloom corn versus the hybrid. But all the other varieties were pretty unidentifiable. All of the CSA members have always been really interested in what we do here. Each spring we host an open house for people who have always been members and they can just come and check out what we're doing this year if anything different or for people who are new and have just signed up and want to see where their food is being grown. And so that year on the open house tours, I told them about the sweet corn project that I was doing in the research grant that I was awarded from SARE and a lot of them were really interested in it. And so at first I didn't know where I was going to get my customer test base from. And so then I realized as they were so interested in it that they would be my test base. And so I picked people who I knew appreciated corn, but also people who were new and who had never experienced the difference between heirloom or hybrid varieties. That way we got a good representation of the types of customers who were surveying the corn. The heirloom yellow corn, golden bantam, people didn't care for. I also personally didn't care for the taste of it. The texture was a little tough and it was a little mealy. I think it would have been really good for ground cornmeal. The blue jade people liked the novelty of it, but the ears only got to be about four to five inches long. And so people had to eat a lot of it to feel satisfied. So that wasn't really a viable choice for us to grow. The souls evergreen, the last heirloom variety, people really liked and we were satisfied with and did better under fungal situations than the silver queen, which is its hybrid partner. And then in terms of taste, people never could pinpoint the difference between organic and conventional corn, not to say that doesn't discount the good things or the pros of organic, but in terms of consumer taste tests, they couldn't tell the difference between the two. When we grow white corn now, we do not grow silver queen or silver king anymore. We grow stoles evergreen, which is an heirloom white corn, and it grows really tall, like it's a really tall plant. And at first I thought it wasn't going to be all that productive because typically if plants are overly large, then they don't have as quite as good as production. They put all their energy into growing the plant instead of the fruit. But they produced a nice equal amount of fruit corn ears compared to the silver queen and it didn't get a single instance of smut.