Blogging The Green

I know the title seems like an evocative statement designed to draw your attention but it just so happens to be true.  North Americans, and to a growing extent the rest of the world, has been enslaved by corn.  With the ethanol craze, corns grip will only strengthen.  I would bow to corn myself if it were not for the harshness of her reign.  Corn is in many ways responsible for everything from land degradation, to hormone and antibiotic laced livestock to obesity.  I first thought to write this post after reading a book I picked up at the airport.  The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fantastic book which I will be reviewing shortly.  A number of details in this post come from what I initially discovered in just the first couple chapters of Michael’s book.  I can’t recommend it enough.

If I ask you to think about how we use corn you will probably think of corn on the cob, frozen corn, corn bread and if you think hard, maybe you’ll think about corn feed for livestock.   If that is  what you pictured you have done corn a great disservice.  Corn now owns our farmland, our stockyards our grocery stores and our restaurants.  Not content to own the food chain, corn has diversified.  If you wander through a hardware superstore you will probably see corn in disguise on every shelf along every isle.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a short list of places you will find corn:

In the grocery store there is Soda, fruit drinks, beer, frozen yogurt,  coffee whitener, ketchup, canned fruit, canned soup, maple syrup, cake frosting and every condiment you can put on a hotdog including the hot dog.  Its also in nearly every type of processed food, vitamins, toothpaste, cosmetics and your child’s diapers.   At the hardware store you can find it in charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, cleaners and trash bags.  If that isn’t enough its in pesticides, the cardboard used to package goods, construction wallboard, fiberglass and glue.

This is by no means an exhaustive list.  In fact it feels like I would have to dig to find an equally long list of products that don’t have corn in them.  How did this happen?  When did we blink and let corn take over the world?  Really you can thank the American government for this invasion.  To get a true understanding of corns rise to dominance let me take you back a bit.

The New Deal

Working on a farm has always been about trying to survive years with bad crops and years with really good crops.  With a bad year, as you would expect, a farmer may not get a large enough crop to feed his family.  Unfortunately farmers can suffer on good years as well.  After all, people can only eat so much, no matter how much food is grown.  Many farmers have grown a record crop only to find that every other farmer did as well.  Now no one wants their crop or will only pay pennies on the dollar.  A really good year could actually bankrupt farmers by driving the costs of their crops too low.

It was this boom/bust problem that the government wanted to solve. The solution was part of something called the "New Deal" in 1933.  The government guaranteed a floor level price for a number of farm crops based on the cost incurred to grow it.  If the price of corn ever dropped below this price the farmer got to choose one of two options.  He could dump his corn at the market price, taking the hit and move on or he could store his corn for the future when there was less corn on the market raising the price.  The government would support him by advancing him a loan with his crop as collateral.  When the farmer finally sold the corn he could pay back the loan.

If prices stayed low for too long the farmer could keep the loan and give the government the corn which it would store for times of great shortage.  By all appearances this worked pretty well from the 30’s to the 70’s.  Farmers had a way of balancing their income and where encouraged not to dump excess corn on the market.  This system also meant the government could easily pay for the program since most loans were paid back and the rest was covered by selling the surplus corn the government acquired.

The new New Deal

A new plan emerged in the 70’s.  In this plan the government still set a floor price but it paid farmers cash to make up any difference in what the farmer sold his corn for.  This new process encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any price even a penny a bushel and the government would pay them the rest.  Corn benefited the most from this system as it is a hearty plant that is easily modified to survive growing methods that would harm other crops.  If you put yourself in the shoes of a corn farmer I think you might see where this can and did go off the rails.

Farmers began growing as much corn as they could since the market price no longer mattered.  Thanks to improving technology a farmer can grow a lot of corn per acre.  As more and more corn was dumped on the market the price continued to plummet and eventually the government decided to lower the floor price of corn.  Now the farmers are making less money per bushel so to keep paying the bills they plow under a few more acres of land to plant even more corn.  This drives the prices down again and along with it the government again lowers the floor price in a vicious circle.  In this way corn takes over more and more land and the usage of fertilizers and pesticides increases steadily in the name of creating as much corn as possible.  As of 2005 it cost $2.50 to grow a bushel of corn but farmers could only sell it for $1.45.  Despite this, thanks to the subsidies, the American farmer is forced into a continuing downward and seemingly illogical spiral to dump as much corn on the market as possible.

Corn Corn Everywhere

So now there are literally billions of bushels of corn being grown.  What do we do with them?  This is how corn took over.  Anytime there is an unnaturally cheap and abundant raw material, someone will step up and figure out a way to use it.  Step up they did.  The single biggest user is the feedlot and the corn fed cow.   The sad part of this tale is that cows don’t eat corn.  A diet of corn causes all sorts of problems in cows from bloat to acidosis leading to ulcers, liver disease and a weakening of the immune system.  There is a good chance that if a cow was fed corn for any longer than they currently are on a feed lot it would destroy their livers.  Knowing all this how do the cows remain healthy enough to become our food?  The magic word is antibiotics.  Since most feedlot cattle are sick or are on the verge of sickness, antibiotics are supplemented with their feed.  This practice is widely recognized as the leading cause of antibiotic resistant germs.  Scientists have also noted that many of the health problems associated with eating red meat probably have more to do with eating corn fed red meat then the red meat itself.  If this much problem is caused by feeding cows corn what could come of the fact that we even feed farm salmon corn now?  I’m pretty sure a wild salmon has never seen a kernel of corn.

The second big user of corn is the processing plant.  Raw corn goes into a processing plant and comes out as hundreds of different substances you would recognize on any ingredient list: Fructose, glucose, modified starches, MSG, citric acid and sorbitol to name a few.  Thanks to the mountains of excess corn, a lot of clever people have dedicated a lot of time to creating new products out of the golden kernels.  We now live in an age where a milkshake from McDonalds is 78% corn.

In comes Ethanol

In the last couple years the government has found a new way to use up all the corn we grow, ethanol.  For the first time in a long time, thanks to this new market, the price of corn has risen well above the cost to grow it without needing a total crop failure.  The reality is that Corn based fuel probably would never have been considered without all the built in government subsidies keeping the prices down.  I doubt it makes sense even with corn at a low price if you take into account all the other monetary and environmental costs.  (You can see my thoughts on biofuel this in a previous entry, Biofuel or Biofool)  Now that prices are high the pressure on farmers to expand their corn crops will likely increase.  With that will come increased over working of the land, fertilization and pesticides.

Many people will also point to the increasing food costs.  Considering corns dominance in the grocery store this is unavoidable.  I’m not sure its a bad thing however.  The healthiest food is always found around the edges of the grocery store, the one area corn does not reign supreme.  Its the processed food in the middle that corn rules.  The same processed food that has helped North Americans gain weight year after year, urged on by low prices largely supported by government corn subsidies.  Who knows if we are lucky, maybe the higher prices for corn can curb our appetite for the foods that are killing us.  At least until the whole ethanol boondoggle melts down.  Then we can go back to our high fructose content processed foods.

There is a lot more nuance to the corn story and I highly recommend you check out the Omnivores Dilemma to get more detail.  The book itself isn’t about corn but about all the food we eat and is well worth the read.  There is also a documentary out called King Corn which I have yet to see but hear great things about.

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Tags:   corn · ehtanol · farm subsidies · farming · fertilizer · king corn · new deal · pesticides7 Comments