The Case of the Disappearing Corn Stalks!

One Sunday morning last year Doug and I started driving up the road on our way to church. I glanced out the vehicle window toward the south and was alarmed to see several of our cows OUTSIDE the fence on our property line!

They were only grazing in the grassy buffer on the edge of the crop field, thankfully, but plans had to do a quick shift. Doug and Dad took on cow duty while mom and I went to help with the music at church.

Come to find out, at some point there had been a heavy rain event which washed corn stalks from the neighbor's conventional crop field in large enough quantities that they actually covered over our single strand of high tensile electric fence. And because none of us thought to look at that section of fence before we turned the cows in, some of them took it upon themselves to walk right across the cornstalk bridge!

Although not as massive as when the river gets out and floats cornstalk debris everywhere, this was no small pile. When soil suffers from a broken water cycle and can't absorb very high rainfall rates, the water starts flowing on the surface quickly and carries both soil particles and surface litter with it. This issue alone I know has to play a significant role in flash flooding. The truth is a lot of farm ground today needs some serious healing, and it can neither absorb nor store very much water in its current state.

Here's a little closer view of the thickest part of the pile.

And in a little "micro-pond" (whose purpose is to absorb and store a little excess water when it comes fast, and the water then "walks" along keylines, or small terraces following the contour of the land) behind where I was standing in the previous picture...plenty of sediment that washed down from a recent rainfall in that brown pool.

I took the above photos on June 8, 2024. I'm not sure when the rain occurred that washed the cornstalks over the fence, but presumably sometime in the spring of 2024.

Well, on April 28, 2025 I was driving past that spot to take care of the nurse cows and calves. As I drove through, I was blown away by what I saw:

The cornstalks were completely gone! There were a few bare spots in the pasture where the grass had obviously been smothered out, but it was basically bare dirt, not remnants of cornstalks. Even amongst the grass plants there weren't any noticeable stalks that I saw.

My mind was excitedly whirling with the implications of this observation, and I have come up with 3 possible explanations for the disappearing cornstalks.

1. Last November I had heifers and dry cows in this section of pasture for about 3 weeks, feeding hay after they cleaned up the pasture because the drought had stunted our fall/winter grass supply. There is a slim possibility they could have eaten the cornstalks, but I consider this the least likely scenario. 
   
   This corn residue was likely leftover from the 2022 crop year since corn was harvested in the fall of 2024 which means it was probably soybeans in 2023. Plant litter has great difficulty decomposing (being turned into organic matter) if there's no life in the soil, so it just sits there on the surface unless it's washed away or maybe carried off by an ambitious squirrel.
   
   Cows can get picky just having to eat brown grass in the late winter that has been rained on multiple times, leached of some of its nutrients. Two year old corn stalk residue washed up in floodwater? Just doesn't seem likely they'd go for it if they had good hay in front of them...
2. The heavy rain we had a few weeks ago COULD have produced a torrent swift enough to wash away any remaining piles of stalks. I think they would have ended up in the micro pond but I didn't notice any the day I was making the observation. I need to go check the area a little more closely. I would also think even if flowing water moved them, there would be pieces still visible in between clumps of grass since the biggest rain event was only a few weeks ago. Granted, the grass was much shorter at that time than it was when I took the photo on April 28th.
3. This scenario is the one that excites me the most. If the cows didn't eat the stalks last fall, they may have still played a role in their disappearance by walking on them and enhancing their contact with the surface of the soil. Healthy soil cycles. It cycles water, it cycles minerals, it cycles nutrients. The microbes, earthworms, insects, fungi, living roots (louder for the ones in the back!)...they all play a role in those cycles. And in a fairly non-brittle environment such as ours here in Indiana, dead plant litter doesn't just sit around on healthy soil...it gets broken down and returned to the soil by the life therein. In a brittle environment, this process REQUIRES animal impact in the form of grazing herds punctuated by rest periods, but when rainfall is more prevalent and evenly dispersed throughout the year it can happen to some degree even without this specific animal impact I believe. But not without the life in the soil!
   
   Research is being done that reveals more life in the soil leads to more phytonutrients in the food, and phytonutrients have many connections to various aspects of human health. If our pasture can disappear 2.5 year old cornstalks in less than 10 months that ought to indicate something is working fairly well!
   

Whatever the full explanation may be, I am saddened by the fact that the neighbor's farm ground continues to lose soil particles every year (the ones from this field mostly get stopped in our pastures, though), future organic matter in the form of plant litter, and water his crop might desperately long for after a few weeks of no rain. But I am certainly encouraged by the fact that there is evidence of improved water and nutrient cycles on our side of the fence. I guess I can put up with a few corn stalks as long as our subsoil army turns them into something beneficial!

Well, as long as the cows don't get out ;)