Farmers Work to Save an Iconic Crop by Teaming Up and Trying New Tools — Including Moths With an STD

Jul 29, 2024

By Stina Sieg

After worms ravaged last year’s Olathe sweet corn crop, the infestation has returned. But farmers on the Western Slope are banding together and using new tools to fight back.

The coalition includes the one who brought the iconic Colorado corn variety to the world about 40 years ago.

Under the baking sun, 84-year-old John Harold stands in his denim overalls at the edge of a bright-green field as workers pick tender ears by hand and toss them up to the crew riding what they call a “corn machine,” a harvesting contraption that looks a biplane slowly moving through the rows.

Other workers package the golden ears, prized by consumers and cooks alike for their sugary-sweet flavor, before sending corn-filled boxes out on trucks.

Their fate? Cow feed.

In his no-nonsense way, Harold explains that a quarter of his crop or more is too damaged to sell to customers at markets due to repeated attacks from worms, birds, beetles — even raccoons.

“I don't know if there's a battalion of 'em or what,” he said, “but I can see ears of corn all over the ground that they ate last night or this morning.”

His son, David, has taken the lead in finding other new ways of growing and protecting the family’s harvest. That includes talking to other farmers around the world who are struggling to solve the same madding puzzle.

David Harold even brought over a farmer from Australia to try to help, and he’s also started to deploy a new method of releasing moths infected with a sexually transmitted disease that he said may help sterilize the local moth population.

David Harold said he knows there’s a lot of pressure on Tuxedo Corn, the company that’s synonymous with the iconic Colorado crop and owns the trademark “Olathe Sweet.” He said he’s trying to make sure the business can keep providing the country with delicious and affordable ears, just as it has for the past four decades.

“With climate change, with pests, with all the things we're facing, it's getting harder and harder to do that,” David Harold said. “And the prices are going up and it's getting tough to survive.”

Click here to see more...

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.