Cateto Sulino Flint Corn

(orange) 100 days. [Blend of Argentine and Uruguayan landraces, selected in TN by Joshua Gochenour, for insect resistance, virus resistance, and bright orange color that indicates high carotene content.] Ears up to 8 in. on 5-8 ft. stalks. Kernels are such a bright orange, inside and out, that Farm and Sparrow bakery in North Carolina says it’s caused customers to ask why they’d put cheddar cheese in the bread they’d baked using it! Name may be roughly translated as “Southern Unrefined.” Small packet (42 g) has about 158 seeds.

Historical notes regarding the name Cateto:
The word Cateto is:
a) often used in Portuguese as an adjective to describe rice, to say that it is brown rice, and
b) used in Spain, and perhaps in Latin America, similarly to how people speaking English use the words redneck and hick.

Cateto corns were collected from the 1940s through the 1970s, in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and Chile, during multiple seed collecting expeditions by multiple national and international organizations. Early maize researchers focused initially on Brazil. Given that Cateto corn had that name in Brazil, researchers, and therefore seed banks, just went ahead and called these strains of orange flint corn by “Cateto” no matter where they were grown. In Spanish speaking countries, farmers typically just call them by some form of "anaranjado", "colorado", "amarillo", or "duro" ("Camelia" in Chile). In Portuguese “Sulino” is sometimes used to mean “Southern,” and many field corns from Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil were collected with this suffix attached.

Though the origin of the Cateto name is obscure, it might have been initially used to describe grains that were often looked down upon, and considered unrefined, because they were grown and eaten by lower-class people. Though many plant pigments are also nutrients, people in various parts of the world have at times considered whiteness of grains to be a sign of sophistication. This may have contributed to the use of the name Cateto in Brazil for orange field corns.