PARKE COUNTY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Summers in the Midwest always include humidity, making it feel much hotter than the temperature indicates, but what’s to blame?
“It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity”, is a phrase all Midwestern residents have heard before, but what many people don’t know is that a local crop is adding to that.
Dan Quinn is a Corn Specialist for Purdue University Extension. He said corn naturally adds moisture into the air.
“It’s largely a function of transpiration”, Quinn said. “Corn is giving off water vapor through its leaves. It’s the process of the plant taking in water and giving water back to the atmosphere.”
The biggest effect is felt this time of year.
“A lot of corn around the state is in pollination, you can see the tassel, that’s when the highest amount of transpiration or water loss from the plant occurs”, Quinn said. “In a lot of localized areas, near corn, it is raising a small amount of that localized humidity.”
In the Midwest, corn has gotten the blame, but all crops go through this process.
“Corn gets the large part of the blame because we have a lot of it, we have a lot of productive corn around the state”, Quinn said. “In reality, every plant you see is transpiring. Even humans are transpiring, when you sweat and its hot out, we’re transpiring as well. It actually is your lawns, it’s your trees, it’s the soybeans, it’s a lot of the other crops that are around here that are contributing that higher level of moisture in the air.”
Despite causing people to sweat more, Quinn said farmers make transpiration their goal.
“The better a crop is, the more water it’s going to transpire”, Quinn said. “We have a lot of very productive fields here in Indiana and from a farmer’s standpoint, the better a crop is and the higher the yielding it is, the more transpiration is going to occur.”
Quinn went on to say that, even with the amount of corn and other crops the Midwest has, summer rain still has the biggest effect on moisture in the air.
