As few Iowa Staters would deny and history has proven well, agriculture is one of the most important foundations on which to build a civilization. However, which crop is most important to America’s history is far more debatable.

Iowans would almost surely contend that corn has played the largest role in America’s history. As we all learned in grade school, the pilgrims’ seemingly idyllic first Thanksgiving — some time around 1621 — was made possible thanks to Squanto, the American Indian who taught the Plymouth colonists to plant kernels in little holes with small fish, nature’s fertilizer and the key [at that time] to corn-growing success.

And while the inaugural turkey day was likely nowhere as close to perfect as American mythology has made it, corn was indeed more responsible for the pilgrims’ survival than anything else.

As Plymouth Colony’s governor, William Bradford, attested in his journal, “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn for we know not how else we would have done.”

Thus, while the cash crop called tobacco was creating an American economy in the South, corn was keeping soon-to-be “Americans” fed up and down the eastern coast.

Fast forward 380 years, and corn is still king. The crop feeds most of the animals we eat, helps our vehicles run [whether for good or bad] and is found, according to Michael Pollan — contributing writer to New York Times Magazine and food activist — in some form in an astonishing half of the items sold in a typical grocery store and all but a few of those sold in a McDonald’s.

Due to this diverse utility, the U.S. Agriculture Department reports a whopping 87 million acres of American farmland — including approximately 13 million acres of Iowa — were planted with corn last spring.

Consider this number in relation to tobacco cultivation — the department reported a mere 343,650 acres planted in 2009 — and corn’s long-lasting importance to America is clear.

But I’m going to warn you, my dear Iowans, that king corn may soon face some real challenges from an unlikely competitor: cotton.

“Cotton?” you are likely exclaiming. “The stuff isn’t even edible,” you’re probably thinking. And indeed, it isn’t. Cotton may be the “fabric of our lives” — and billions of others’, as it is grown in 80 countries and accounts for nearly 40 percent of total world fiber production — but it offers nothing to fill human bellies.

While cottonseeds are rich in protein, they are also covered in gossypol, a chemical that protects the plant from insects and microbe infestation but is toxic to people — not to mention pigs and chickens.

It is no wonder that the cultivation of the crop has dropped sharply in recent times, from more than 14 million acres in 2006 to little more than 8 million acres in 2009.

But the plant’s future may not be as grim as these numbers suggest. According to recent field trial data from Keerti Rathore, a professor at Texas A&M University, genetic engineering allows plant breeders to turn off the genes that stimulate the production of gossypol in a plant’s cottonseeds while, very importantly, maintaining the production of gossypol throughout the rest of the plant.

As previous researchers had found in the 1950s, a cotton plant doesn’t stand a chance against insects if it contains no gossypol, but Rathore seems to have found his way around this problem through RNA interference, a precise enzyme-blocking process. Results of greenhouse trials show the genetically modified plant appears to pass on its new trait while remaining otherwise normal, and the potential implications are jaw-dropping.

“This research potentially opens the door to utilizing safely more than 40 million tons of cottonseed produced annually as a large, valuable protein source,” said Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist who died Saturday, leaving behind a legacy that included the development of a high-yield wheat that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

By most estimates, the current crop would yield enough seeds to fulfill the annual protein requirements of 500 million people.

Of course, further testing is required and the government would need to approve of the genetically modified cottonseeds, which Rathore says taste like chickpeas, before we could see them on the shelves at Hy-Vee.

But these findings are nothing but promising, and while cotton will likely never fill Iowa’s fields, ISU researchers should do all they can to advance the knowledge in this emerging, internationally-applicable field.

Do so, and perhaps cotton will join corn on the throne, where, by offering that much sought-after combination of carbohydrates and protein, they can do the world a whole heap of good.

– Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Maryland.