Purdue Soy and Corn Competitions

Purdue Soy and Corn Competitions have Record Participation 02/22/2009Andy Eubank
The Indiana Corn and Soybean new uses competition at Purdue University is heating up. On a recent trip to the campus Ryan West, New Uses Director, found thirteen teams of students on track to complete the competition in March. That’s an 8-team improvement over the best year ever, last year. West is excited about this year’s crop of projects made of corn and or soy. He said, “We’ve seen some very interesting ideas and it will be interesting to see if students will be able to pull off some of their ideas. They’re making progress in the lab with everything from a complete car waxing system using corn and soy to ice melt.”The prize money is up quite a bit this year. A team using soy could win $25,000 and the top corn prize in its first year is $10,000. West told HAT they needed to up the ante to compete with other Purdue competitions. “One example of that is the Burton Morgan entrepreneur contest where students write a business plan and come up with a business model for an invention, a product. They don’t actually have to make it and they don’t have to do packaging or any of those types of things. But we do. So we’re excited about the holistic nature and various exposures that these students get. A lot of them are engineering students who don’t think about marketing and packaging, and they may never work in marketing and packaging in their entire life. But it’s good to know that the product they may be working on has to get packaged and marketed somewhere, so we see a lot of benefit there.”
In late March the Indiana Soybean Alliance and Indiana Corn Marketing Council will hold a joint banquet and awards ceremony to honor the winners. All teams will have their projects on display and guests that night will be able to vote for another award, the People’s Choice.Projects will be evaluated and given a tier. For the soybean competition there are three tiers. Multiple teams may be in the same tier. Students on a soybean team that receive a first tier ranking will win $25,000, a second tier teams win $10,000 and third tier teams win $5,000. Students who finish all elements of the soybean competition that did not receive an award will receive a participatory award of $2,000. One winner will be awarded $10,000 as the top ranking team in the corn competition along with a $1,000 second place prize.