Corn Stoves This Week's Gangrene Award

Yes folks some idiots are actually burning corn in stoves as a medium for heating their homes.

Those normally wonderful and tasty sweet kernels of corn that we chew off of the cobb are now being used by some supposed green folks as a heating fuel. Some enterprising morons in the Midwest and Northeast are selling stoves that burn dried corn kernels. These stoves are fitted with hoppers in which the kernels are stored and then fed into the stove via an auger. The flow characteristics of the dried kernels allow this "pellet like" fuel to easily stoke the fire in the stove. The dried corn kernels have a heating value in excess of 7,000 BTUs per pound, a value that is similar to hardwood. http://www.cornstoves.info/amaiz_hm.html

Corn kernels have the following composition: 8% protein, 3% oil, 62% starch and 27% water. You have all see the "Nutrition Facts" on food labels. Using the chemical composition of corn listed above, a bushel of corn that weighs 56 pounds has some 100,000 food Calories. If we assume for the moment we could get all of our 2,000 Calories a day from just eating corn, a bushel of corn would feed an adult for almost fifty days. http://www.ansc.purdue.edu/swine/swineday/sday96/psd16-96.htm


Heating a house with corn instead of wood, natural gas, or propane is a crime against humanity and animals. These folks who think they are green are robbing some starving person of protein, lipids and carbohydrates. If they want to heat their homes with biomass they should burn wood in their stoves. Wood has cellulose and lignin that are not digestible by humans, but also have a heat of combustion of approximately 7,000 BTUs per pound. The folks who use corn kernels in their stoves enjoy the ease of filling the hopper with corn rather than splitting logs. As punishment for their crimes against humanity, their sentence should be to split logs all day long.

This week's Gangrene Award, kind of like the "Green Darwin Award", for the dumbest green technology goes to the folks who invented or use corn stoves. Theese folks who think CORN stands for "Cretins Organizing Reduced Nutrition".