Even before checking what the data says, if this is a symbiosis instead of a simple infection, I would say the corn will benefit by large, and the energy balanc

Even before checking what the data says, if this is a symbiosis instead of a simple infection, I would say the corn will benefit by large, and the energy balance will be in favor of corn. Plants get energy from the sun, but can only use it to grow if the right nutrients are available. Nitrogen is needed for protein synthesis and must be readily available. So this is a win-win for corn and bacteria. Synthetic NPK fertilizers are a way of giving plants what they need: generally, farmers will almost always put nitrogen regardless of what the soil already has, which has unintended consequences. So this symbiosis has an added bonus for human communities. Another way of making nitrogen available to plants is to plant mixed crops. The problem with corn is that the shoots are too close to each other to allow anything else to grow, which is something common in large scale agriculture, whose current practice is to make use of large patches of land dedicated to a single annual crop. Whatever is left from the harvest should and must be reintegrated into the soil.