Iowa State Fair 2005
Outreach Coordinator Lois Girton organized the Schnable Lab exhibit, The Story of Corn, for the Agriculture Building at the Iowa State Fair, August 11-25. This event, dubbed “America’s Favorite Fair”, drew over 900,000 visitors with 40% from outside of the State of Iowa. Our exhibit was staged in a prime location next to the corn and giant pumpkin competitions.
The booth proved very popular with the over 25,000 visitors who examined teosinte and corn plants, seeds, and ears, a Diversity of Corn slide show, a video “How to Make a Controlled Corn Cross”, and three informative banners. The first banner, The Origin of Corn, presented evidence for teosinte as the direct ancestor of corn. The second, Corn Diversity, described corn kernel colors and the basis for the five major types of corn – pop, flint, flour, sweet, and dent. Finally, The Corn Genome included an introduction to genome projects, transposable elements, and microarray analyses.
The top attractions in the booth were the corn cutout for photo opportunities and the corn tattoos. Originally designed for the MAGI webpage, the corn tattoo was a wonderful representation of the diversity of kernel color and the work in genome assembly that is done in the Schnable Lab. Applying corn tattoos to people from ages 1 - 87 provided a great opening to discuss the diversity and importance of corn.
