Are you afraid of corncobs shooting through your windshield while you drive? No? Oh, look at you, big shot. Big brave driver isn’t afraid of vegetables shooting through their windshield. Tough guy over here, driving without fear of a cob packed full of delicious yellow kernels penetrating their windshield at incredibly high speeds. You might be singing a different tune if you were the driver of this John Deere tractor caught in the recent Kentucky tornadoes. Because that’s a corn cob embedded in that windshield.
These pictures were first seen on Reddit, where user Dottiemcfierceon posted them with the caption “a machine came through my John Deere for repairs from the tornado in Kentucky,” and the pictures pretty much did the rest of the talking.
I mean, look at them:
I’m amazed it went through blunt-end first, instead of pointy-end-first, which you would think offer some aero benefits. Also notable is how few kernels were lost in the corn’s flight and impact.
There’s so many questions here: was it husked in flight? I doubt it, because it looks like what’s known as dent corn, named for the little dents in the kernels, as you can see in the picture. This looks to be yellow dent corn, which is grown for animal feed and industrial use, as opposed to white dent corn, which is more likely to be made into corn chips and things like that.
If it was animal feed corn, those ears tend to be pretty hard and rugged (and are stored without husks), so I’m not too surprised one flung at the speeds (207 to 260 mph) generated by the wind of an EF4-rated tornado — like the Kentucky one was — would have enough energy to penetrate the windshield of a tractor like that.
This tornado was Kentucky’s deadliest in the history of the state, with 77 people dead, and I genuinely don’t want to make light of this absolute tragedy, but seeing something like this is a shocking reminder of just how violent and powerful these storms can be.