Corn sweet corn

Corn is one vegetable that tells you when you’ve had a lot of it: it ends up in your crap. Unless you’ve got a serious digestive problem, you won’t encounter the same problem with cabbage, carrots, or most other vegetables for that matter. The corn my class planted last year ripened recently, and all the Waldorf upper school students prepared to troop once more to Prado farm, owned by Reimon Gutierrez and his ageless mother. It employs biodynamic farming methods, Rudolf Steiner and Nicanor Perlas style. This time, we were muddled into four chaotic groups. Our task was to harvest, market, and sell our corn. A panel of judges (the teachers) will declare the winner based on how well we performed.

Get ready for The Apprentice: Waldorf Upper School. We were able to start marketing and receiving orders for our corn a week before the harvesting. I devised the marketing strategy of our group. The concept behind it was simple. Be the first in the market. I sent text messages advertising our harvested corn to the parents, former teachers, and relatives whom I thought would be most interested in biodynamic corn as soon as was humanly possible. Since the palengke price of flint corn varies from P40 to P60, I based my price on P50+10 percent because it’s biodynamic. Some other groups were selling for P60 or more, but changed their prices to P50 soon after we announced ours. By the second day, I had already received orders for 50 kilos of corn, and I hadn’t even sold any to my relatives, in sharp contrast to another group whose father bought 24 kilos from them to sell to his staff and workers, or the person who sold her corn to her family at prices that even ranged up to P80 per kilo, and sold to non-family members for much less. In the end, I decided to sell minimal amounts to my own aunts and my corn-loving grandmother. It only made up a small fraction of our sales.

The day before the harvesting, I had single-handedly sold a grand total of 75 kilos. I almost got left behind on H-Day. I’ve gotten used to waking up at 6:30 a.m., so I have time to relax before I go to school at 8 a.m. But my mom didn’t inform me that we were leaving at 7:30 a.m. instead of 8:15 a.m., as a result I barely had time to finish my shower and throw on my clothes. Sprinting across the compound at breakneck speed, I boarded the bus in the nick of time. I dozed off listening to my iPod shortly thereafter, and the next moment we were there. Merienda of boiled corn, grilled corn, guinataan mais, corn juice, and corn gelatin greeted us on our arrival at Prado. Then came the hard part. The much-anticipated and much-dreaded harvesting of the corn had to be done. Each of the groups had to haul in at least 40 kilos of quality corn. When we got out to the cornfields, what amazed me was the lack of conformity. There were some absurdly tiny corn stalks, and there were also corn stalks about as tall as Shaq. Each one looked unique, in the same way no two human beings are alike. Surprisingly enough, some of the smaller stalks had the largest and juiciest corn. I committed the fatal error of not wearing a shirt with long sleeves, and subsequently my forearms developed an extremely sensitive rash over the next few days. I was not alone, but I wasn’t the worst off. Some dunces were wearing shorts, and those with no hats had the skins on their faces roasted by the unrelenting sun. A lot of the corn was still not yet ready to be picked, so we couldn’t just grab the first corn we saw off the stalk. Slowly but surely, the groups plodded stoically through the fields, only selecting the corn that was screaming to be harvested. Those people who have never hefted a basket full of corn to their shoulders have no idea how heavy and unwieldy it is; the baskets we used were about waist-high and half as wide. There also was a horde of insect guerillas that hid inside the corn, only to spring an ambush once their corn was picked. I was a victim of one such ambuscade. A piece of corn that seemed to be bursting with ripeness turned out to be bursting with wasps. I was stung on the neck. It felt like someone was pressing a red-hot poker against my neck, and refused to let go. Thank God it wasn’t a bee, whose sting would have remained in the flesh until my body expelled it out or until my next visit to my doctor. A multitude of hairy caterpillars also seemed to thrive in the corn, and one of my friends had the skin webbing between his thumb and forefinger sliced open by a particularly sharp leaf. It was a truly hazardous harvesting. But regardless of the bugs, dirt, sweat, heat, and other semi-undesirable elements of nature, each group managed to harvest at least 70 kilos. Now we had to negotiate with the mother of Reimon Gutierrez over the price of the corn, we were warned that she drove a hard bargain, and that we shouldn’t be fooled by her age. Two representatives from each group, myself included, went to the negotiating table to haggle with her. I opened the talks aggressively, but some others in the negotiating team rudely tried to interrupt me, on the pretense that I was being disrespectful. Nuts to them, they did nothing for the negotiations. In the end, my good friends Aeon and Edgar softened that tough lady’s heart enough for her to bring down the price to P27 per kilo.

One thing I learned from that encounter is that there are many different ways of dealing with different situations, and it doesn’t hurt to try them all and see which one works best. The person in charge of supplying the packages left without warning as soon as we arrived back at Waldorf, and we had to use old plastic bags for the first few people who needed their corn right away.

I swear, I never want to bite into another piece of corn again in my life for now. I’m sick of it. Hopefully by this Wednesday we’ll know who won our little contest, and we’ll see whether a good strategy will triumph over cheap shots and scamming family members.