About Time to Shove the Cob

Enema U is an ag school, so I guess technically, I’m an Aggie.  Yeah, I’ve heard all the Aggie jokes.  (Did you hear about the Aggie coyote that got caught in the trap?  Chewed off three legs and was still caught in the trap.)  

Strangely, about the only people who ever tell me Aggie jokes or even use the word around me are university administrators hired from back east who are obviously a little embarrassed at finding themselves working at Harvard on the Rio Grande.  These are the people who sign their constant stream of nonsensical email with the phrase, “Go Aggies!”  

While the vast majority of faculty and students at Enema U have never been within a hundred yards of a tractor, it is still hard to spend a few decades at an agricultural school without learning something about growing crops.  I guess if you went back in time and plucked up a reasonably intelligent Neanderthal and dropped him down in the middle of a modern nuclear power plant for thirty or so years, he would eventually figure out a few things.  That’s me—an agricultural Neanderthal.

I’ve learned a few things about corn, probably the most genetically modified crop grown today.  At archaeology sites, I’ve seen some ancient examples of what corn used to be like.  Most people would not even recognize corn’s cultigen (original form).  Looking more like bumpy okra that corn, the cob was originally only a few inches long and had only five rows of tiny kernels.

Thousands of years ago, some farmer must have noticed that one of the ears of corn in his crop had seven rows instead of five and wisely decided to save it for seed.  Over a long time, such tiny selective processes have led to the monster ears of corn I like to roast in my BBQ grill.  (As Nero Wolfe said, people who boil ears of corn should themselves be boiled.)  

What originally got me to thinking about all of this was a conversation I had with my neighbor, Chuck—who is also an Aggie (though I think of him more as an autodidact).  We were talking about mechanization of troops in WWII, which eventually led us to discussing the rapid adaptation of tractors in the 20th Century.  If we hadn’t run short of beer...and if our good friend, Jack, had been present...we eventually would have balanced the national budget and brought about peace in the Middle East.

For some reason, people seem to believe that when new technology is invented, the old tech magically vanished instantly.  Worse, some politicians think that by outlawing the old tech, they can speed the adoption of new technology.  (California’s banning new gasoline-powered cars will not cause a dramatic increase in sales of electric vehicles, it will cause a dramatic increase in the sale of gasoline cars in neighboring states.)  In any case, the incorporation of tractors in farming was slower than most people think.

Among the “benefits” of the mechanization of farming wasn’t just the increase in efficiency:  mechanization also dramatically increased the amount of land being used to grow food for the table.  Before tractors, fully 40% of the cropland in America was being used to grow fodder for draft animals.  As the use of tractors grew, increasingly more of that land was used for the production of human food stuffs, which, while it dropped prices for consumers, also brought about agricultural overproduction that aggravated the Great Depression.

Eventually, Americans found markets for the surplus...which was good...but they also found other uses for the surplus, such as for corn, and this has turned out to be something of a problem.  Slowly, more and more corn was used to produce ethanol and high fructose corn sugar.  Today, the vast majority of corn production is used for these two products, so that the area of farmland used to produce corn  is roughly the size of California and 40% of that is to grow corn for the ethanol industry.

Ethanol production has not proved to be the environmental solution that most of us were promised.  It is bad for most engines, it is more expensive to produce than gasoline, and perhaps worst of all, it has totally warped the political landscape of the United States.  As every American is currently (and somewhat painfully) aware, presidential politics revolve around the Electoral College, which means that candidates must do well in the early primaries (particularly in Iowa, the golden buckle of the Corn Belt).

Every politician, whether Democrat or Republican, who hopes to do well in Iowa eagerly takes the Corn Pledge.  That’s a political promise to continue government subsidies for corn.  Today, largely because of the political power of the Midwest states in determining early primary races, the federal government spends more on subsidizing corn through direct payments, tax credits, low cost crop insurance, and subsidies for ethanol production, than on any other crop.  This is currently about $100 billion a year.  With these subsidies, corn is profitable, prompting even more farmers to switch their agricultural production from foodstuffs to non-food corn, slowly raising the prices of the food.  Today, corn is produced in all fifty states, and every year the total number of acres producing corn increases about 3%.

As more and more of the Midwest is devoted to producing a single crop, the risk to the economics of the agricultural community increases.  A bad year resulting from a worse than normal drought, a crop disease, or a flood would mean wide-scale disaster to the entire industry, and enormous cost to the taxpayers (who fund the federal crop insurance).

In addition, there are indirect costs of corn production:  Roughly six million tons of nitrates from fertilizer annually wash down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, helping to produce a “dead zone” that is seven thousand square miles this year.  This growing dead zone kills fish, shrimp, and oysters, raising the price of seafood to the consumer.  And every year, America’s burgeoning corn crop requires the use of more groundwater than the year before.

Worse, while ethanol is “cleaner” than gasoline, that is not the whole story.  To produce really large and profitable crops, corn farmers must use a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides—all of which require even more petroleum for their production, transportation, and application.  Further, for reasons that are too involved for this blog, processing corn releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.  Increasingly, economists who have studied the net result of all of this have concluded there is little, if any, benefit to the environment from switching to ethanol.

The worst part of all of this is that the type of corn grown for ethanol and high fructose corn syrup isn’t even edible.  It’s a special variety of corn that you would have to boil for a day to get it soft enough to chew, and even then, it would have no flavor.  Even an Aggie knows this  stuff is not only not meant for humans, it hardly qualifies to be called corn.  

But, I’m just a poor dumb ol’ country boy:  Maybe you should ask a real Aggie.