leaky crop
n.— «Corn is what scientists call a leaky crop. When it’s fertilized, it cannot absorb one hundred percent of the nutrients we give it.» —“Chesapeake Bay Funds Added To Farm Bill” by Alex DeMetrick WJZ-TV (Baltimore, Maryland) Apr. 30, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...
The owner of a Berlin, Maryland, produce stand wants to know: When a customer is buying four ears of corn, should they say I have four corn or I have four ears of corn? Corn is a mass noun that can also be counted as a plural, just as we might say I...