King Corn
Last night finished watching a feature documentary film by the same name. Two young fellers, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis decide to return to their ancestral home in central Iowa. There they plant an acre of corn and trace the path that corn makes from seedlings to finished product. If you’ve seen fast food nation, this is even more frightening.In spring the team of intrepid city boys pair hook up with a local farmer to plant their acre. The stuff that gets planted is genetically modified stock that has been bred to produce a massive yield of totally inedible corn. The resulting ‘corn’ is actually used as a feedstock for industrial quality ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, and cattle feed. If you want edible corn, you’ve got to plant something else entirely. Another wonderful feature of this GMO corn is that it resists a certain type of herbicide that is sprayed on the fields and kills the weeds, wild marijuana and other stuff the farmers don’t want messing with their corn crop.What happens when the trail of corn leaves the farm is where the real fun begins. Approximately 10% of the crop is used to make ethanol, the common additive to gasoline. 40% goes to make high fructose corn syrup which ends up in virtually all our food and makes us fat as hogs. The remaining 50% is used in feedlots where cattle are stuffed full of it for 120 days before then are ‘sent to market’ as the saying goes. You may remember, cattle don’t naturally eat corn as food, grass is more to their taste. But cattle don’t fatten up nearly as fast on grass as when they are being stuffed to the hilt with corn, so corn it is. Time to market is everything.Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture in the Nixon administration is interviewed. When he took office, Federal policy was to have farmers withhold land from production, the idea being to stabilize farm prices. The Nixon bunch turned that whole thing upside down by essentially telling farmers to put as much land into production as possible-bigger is better, so the saying goes. But the free market economics of corn production is such that farmers loose money on the corn they grow. So the government (that’s us) pays farmers a subsidy and sinking allowance at the end of the season, so they actually do have some take home pay for their labors.Butz points out that when he took office, the average American family spent something close to 32% of take home pay on groceries. Now that figure is close to 16%, about half of where things stood in the 70’s. I really question whether we and the farmers that feed us are better for it.Jeremy Myers is the owner of Lyssabeth’s click here for more info.
