ISSS608 Group07 Proposal

Corn: The A-maize-ing Crop.

Overview

Proposal

Poster

Application

Report

Overview
Corn or Maize (as called in some countries) was first grown in ancient Central America. Corn has become a staple in many parts of the world, providing not only substances that we fill our belly with, but also act as the raw ingredient for corn ethanol, animal feed etc. The United States accounts for about 40% of production of corn in the world¹, which makes it the largest corn producer. The major portion of production is found in the Midwestern states, such as Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota – these states were grouped and eventually became known as the ‘Corn Belt’. The Corn Belt has about 96,000,000 acres of land just for corn production. The stat^{es that make up the Corn Belt were selected due to levelled land, fertile and highly organic soils}2.

Objective and Scope

Objective

For this project, there are two objectives to be met:
Visualisation objective

1. To identify which corn hybrid is the best to grow in across all different environments
   
2. To identify which environment is the best to grow the most corn hybrids
   
3. To identify which hybrid is the best to grow in which environment
   
   

Analysis objective
The Analysis objective is to characterise the yield of the hybrid with respect to the variations in environment factors using Geo-weighted Regression model.

Scope

The scope of the project is limited to the corn produced in USA, specifically the Corn Belt regions. We will also limit the environmental factors to be the following:

1. Precipitation
   
2. Exposure length to sun
   
3. Average Temperature
   
4. Location of where the hybrid is planted
   
5. When the hybrid was planted
   
   

Reference

The image for the banner was taken from https://iegvu.agribusinessintelligence.informa.com/CO215920/South-Africa-corn-planting-plummets.

[1] Olson, R. A., & Sander, D. H. (1988). Corn production. Corn and corn improvement, (cornandcornimpr), 639-686.
[2] Smith, C. W. (2004). Corn: origin, history, technology, and production (Vol. 4). John Wiley & Sons.