In my very first article for Grist a year and a half ago, I declared with confidence that "If you're going to talk about poverty, food, and the environment in the United States, you might as well start in the Corn Belt."
Trouble is, I had never actually been in corn country, at least not in sentient memory.
All of that changed Tuesday, when I landed in Des Moines on assignment for Grist. Here are some of my first impressions.
* Iowa, at least the part I've seen so far, is not as rigorously and brutally flat as I'd always assumed. In the mental image I'd formed, an even growth of corn stretched over the landscape, flat and tight as a sheet over a hotel bed.
While the corn is certainly there -- i.e, everywhere -- the land is actually contoured. The landscape may not quite qualify as "rolling," but it undeniably ripples a bit.
To be honest, I expected to become a bit undone by the Iowa landscape, to feel alienated, disoriented, one small human surrounded to all horizons by billions and billions of identical plants. Yet the contours give the landscape just enough contrast to be interesting and, yes, beautiful -- in that monochrome way the sea is beautiful.
* I'm staying in a farmhouse converted into a B&B in Prairie City, a tiny farm village 30 miles east of Des Moines. I got in after dark on Tuesday. The next morning, I woke up and rushed outside to take in the cornography.
Damn. Not ten yards from the house, a cornfield looms, one that stretches thousands of acres in all directions. There's an old saying: A good corn crop should be "knee-high by the fourth of July." Well, it's late July, and the corn is towering well above my head.
The couple who run the B&B are retired farmers. My first night, the wife was explaining to me how high the corn had gotten. Her husband stands at least 6 feet tall. "He was out in the cornfield yesterday just to see how the crop was doing, and he looked like a tiny little fella out there," she told me. The husband told me the current crop is ripening faster than any he's seen in his life.
Some parts of the Corn Belt are facing drought conditions, but prospects for 2007 look good. There should be plenty of product to satisfy ethanol producers, CAFO operators, and high-fructose corn syrup makers.
It's amazing that so much effort and land are devoted to such dubious uses.
* I checked out the soil beneath the corn: rich and black, as expected. The plants are so tightly packed together that you can barely get your hand between them to separate them -- a triumph of science. Only special hybridized breeds of corn can thrive in such close quarters, and only soil heavily spiked with synthetic fertilizer could possibly support them.
There's plenty of litter from previous harvests decaying on the ground: old cobs and leaves and stalks. That stuff will break down and become soil itself: it's about all the land gets in terms of organic matter to replace the humus consumed by the intensive planting.
It's mind-boggling that people with real power are talking quite seriously about harvesting even that "waste" and turning it into fuel for our cars. What, if and when cellulosic ethanol finally comes online, will become of that rich, black soil -- one of the greatest stores of soil fertility on earth? Should we really burn through the Midwest's topsoil to keep our cars on the road?
* How did this happen, this vast duo-crop (corn and soy) that lies like a dead hand over the nation's prime farmland?
I went out to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames yesterday, and talked to Rich Pirog and Fred Fred Kirschenmann. Rich showed me this impressive graph demonstrating the collapse in crop diversity on Iowa's farms since 1920. What happened?
I'm reading A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, a reworking of King Lear set on an Iowa farm in the '80s. The narrator describes the mentality of her father, a proud old farmer contemplating retirement:
What is a farmer? A farmer is a man who feeds the world.
What is a farmer's first duty? To grow more food.
What's a farmer's second duty? To buy more land.
What are the signs of a good farm? Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will ask you no favors.
At another point, the old man says this: "There isn't any room for the old methods anymore. Farmers who embrace the new methods will prosper, but those who don't are already stumbling around."
By "old methods," he means mixed cropping, handwork, fussing over one's animals. By "new methods," he means monocropping, chemicals, giant machines, confining your animals in feedlots.
I'm stunned by this weird cobbling together of old Protestant virtue (no debt, no favors asked) and this zeal for the new and the latest.
I suppose it's what Max Weber was getting at in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
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GreenEngineer Posted 2:33 am
26 Jul 2007
Any theories on that?
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Kristina & Jason Makansi Posted 3:20 am
26 Jul 2007
According to a press release announcing a new paper by Jesse Ausubel of The Rockefeller University, "Increased use of biomass fuel in any form is criminal...Humans must spare land for nature. Every auto would require a pasture of 1-2 hectares."
Ausubel argues that renewables -- hydro, biomass, wind, solar -- are not good for the environment because they do not benefit from economies of scale. In fact, he says, "Renewables may be renewable but they are not green. If we want to minimize new structures and the rape of nature, nuclear energy is the best option."
His argument stems from the fact that to produce more energy from renewable sources, more land is needed. Renewables are, in other words, low density energy producers. "Nuclear energy", Ausubel says, "is green." He argues that,"Considered in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."
That's because the uranium atom is so dense. In terms of energy density, in a head-to-head comparison between nuclear and the renewables mentioned above, nuclear is, according to Ausubel, the undisputed winner.
So, on the plus side, nuclear power has unparalleled energy density and a lack of CO2 emissions from the plant. However, when you look at the lingering issue of spent fuel and the problems faced by Tokyo Electric after the recent earthquake, it is clear, as we say in Lights Out, "the [nuclear] industry is still one major accident away from another trip to oblivion."
Pearl Street/Jason and Kristina Makansi
Learn more and order Lights Out at http://www.jasonmakansi.com/lightsout_endorsements.html
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justlou Posted 3:26 am
26 Jul 2007
Removing the stover or above ground plant parts for cellulosic ethanol production, as some have proposed, has the potential to reduce organic matter in about half the soils used to produce corn.
In your own garden situation, the combination of tilling and aerating the soil plus not returning enough organic matter likely had a much greater impact on your soils organic matter and tilth than the nitrogen fertilizers you added.
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Kristina & Jason Makansi Posted 3:39 am
26 Jul 2007
Fatally flawed attack on renewables by Jesse Ausubel
Pearl Street/Jason and Kristina Makansi
Learn more and order Lights Out at http://www.jasonmakansi.com/lightsout_endorsements.html
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GreenEngineer Posted 4:25 am
26 Jul 2007
There's also alot of talk in organic circles about how destructive chemical N2 is to the soil, particularly the organic matter content. But like Tom, I haven't been to Iowa (at all, in my case), so I haven't seen it first-hand. Thus my question.
nd the corn/soy rotation mimics the composition of native grasses and legumes that were important components of the tall grass prairie.
Incidentally, this is a poor imitation at best. The tall grass prairie had a high proportion of perennials, which tend to build soil rather than depleting it. That's why The Land Institute is trying to develop cultivars of perennial grasses.
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usandthem Posted 4:16 pm
28 Jul 2007
Why not ask why!?
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Ron Steenblik Posted 10:39 pm
28 Jul 2007
The prospect of an abundant harvest in the key corn states of Illinois and Iowa has given critical momentum to the $300 billion farm bill headed for the House floor Thursday, under threat of a possible veto by President Bush.
The proposed legislation closely follows the blueprint of the last five-year farm bill in 2002, providing generous subsidies popular with farmers and another big commitment to ethanol fuel. Critics who consider the measure a waste of tax dollars and a barrier to trade agreements might have gotten more traction if farmers such as [Peotone, Illinois corn farmer Jim] Robbins had failed to deliver.
A miserable crop and soaring corn prices would have changed the debate over the bill, making it tougher to fend off reform and retain so much of the oft-criticized 2002 provisions, farm experts said. Robbins is toasting the good fortune: "There probably would have been less money available," he said. "But we're not going to have a problem with supply this year."
Schadenfreude (or its opposite) is never appropriate when the price of food is at stake, but clearly the corn-ethanol industry has had luck on its side this year ... and has succeeded in dodging another bullet.
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