Yield is everything to farmers, the more they can grow in a small area, the more money they make. All this close-proximity growth has turned the once fertile soil of Iowa into dust. Today, less than 2 million Americans farm, and somehow they manage to feed all the rest of us.
2. PLANTING THE CITY OF CORN
Many times, soybeans are rotated with corn, as soy is the second leg supporting the industrial food system. Pollan describes sitting on a tractor going down miles of corn as monotonous, I can only imagine. He goes into detail of the seeds planted "an adaptable hybrid with solid agronomics and yield potential." Which is not the same as GMOs, genetically modified organisms. Many of Naylor's neighbors have a distrust of the seed, especially because of its cost. Did you know that one acre of corn produces 180 bushels of corn, which each holds 56 pounds of kernels? That's over 10,000lbs of food per acre! I agree with Pollan when he says that it's crazy to think that these plants, that grow so close together don't compete to the death for resources--its "the true socialist utopia."
3. VANISHING SPECIES
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| You don't see this anymore |
The population of corn pushes out the animals, other plants and people that surround it. It constantly takes up more room and more resources than there are to provide for every specie around. The cows, chickens, apples, hay, potatoes, oats, cherries, wheat and grapes have disappeared from the modern farm. Even many farmers have left to make room for rows upon rows of golden corn. We can't blame it all on the corn though, it was the tractor after all that started the chain reaction of monotony. By the 1980s, "corn was king," and the farm towns became ghost towns.
4. THERE GOES THE SUN
Pollan explains why chemical fertilizer is also to be blamed for this corn explosion. The ammonium nitrate turned from the war effort to the peaceful home effort is consumed greedily by hybrid corn. Since nitrogen is recieved in this manner, rotating the crops with legumes is no longer needed. It was Fritz Haber who perfected this processes (oops--this helped Hitler to develop the gas used in concentration camps during WWII). It has been estimated that the Haber-Bosch process to fix nitrogen has allowed for two out of five humans alive today to be alive. It's crazy to think that by fixing a chemical that makes up 80% of our atmosphere could help all these people survive. The ugly twist? The synthetic nitrogen has immense waste that contributes to acid rain and global warming. Plus, it can be expensive. This invention has changed the diet of the world, as well as it's ecology--the biodiversity of the world is shrinking.
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