What About Corn?
Football is very important to the proud citizens of Nebraska, particularly their beloved University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. When that team - a perennial powerhouse - plays at home, Memorial Stadium in Lincoln becomes the state’s third-largest city. Fun Fact: The University’s logo, the Big Red N, is generally understood among the people of the state to stand for Knowledge...
I know this because I once attended that particular institution. Upon my acceptance as a student, I had never traveled east of the Rockies, so my initial roadtrip to Lincoln was also my introduction to the Midwestern landscape.
Late July, eastbound on Interstate 80, roughly paralleling the Platte River (“A mile wide and an inch deep: too thin to plow and too thick to drink”), I was mid-Nebraska when a change in the vegetation became apparent: the dry, high-prairie grasslands of eastern Colorado were giving way to green fields of corn. And I mean a lot of cornfields. Cornfields stretching limitlessly in every direction. This cornfield view became one of dispiriting monotony*as the overloaded, non-air-conditioned family hand-me-down Honda Accord soldiered its way into the thickening humidity en route to my ensuing years at the “Harvard of the Prairie”.
I had entered the Midwest's Corn Belt, an immense area stretching east-to-west for 900 miles, and north-to-south for for 400. Had I not stopped in Lincoln for college, but instead continued eastbound, that same mind-numbing cornfield view would have continued all the way through Iowa, then all the way through Illinois, then all the way through Indiana, then into mid-Ohio. We’re talking about a couple of long days at freeway speeds with only a corn vista.
Corn is so ubiquitous throughout this region that a text-only representation of I-80 through Iowa would look like:
corn-corn-corn-corn-corn-corn-corn-Des Moines-corn-corn-corn-corn-corn-corn-corn
I initially assumed that all of that corn was destined to be eaten by people, because we humans enjoy its many delicious forms: fresh, frozen, popped and caramelized, cracked, syruped, and canned.
But not the unholy creamed corn – only ax-murderers enjoy that.
But still... there’s no possible way humanity could choke down that much corn! Or could we?
We can’t. Tucked away in the university’s agronomy program, I soon learned that the Corn Belt’s vast crop output was inedible to humans (whaaat?!), destined instead to feed lots of animals in feed lots (see what I did there?).
Feed lots feed lots
The Corn Belt’s boundary encompasses what was originally the Tallgrass Prairie, an area of unparalleled fertility, supported by some of the world's richest, deepest soils. One of my University of Nebraska professors had estimated that if everyone on the planet ate a plant-based diet, the American Midwest could feed the entire human population.
Today, little is left of that prairie perfection, replaced instead with horizon-stretching fields dedicated to raising food indigestible by humans. Here’s a map that I created that shows the proportion of each county (lower 48 states) dedicated to growing livestock grains. It’s a lot of acreage. In fact, if it were gathered all in one place it would be larger than Texas! Remember, this doesn’t include crops grown for direct human consumption, such as wheat for bread or salad tomatoes. We humans are a busy lot.
This map’s data includes corn, soybeans, and sorghum production. Of those three, corn accounts for about 95% of the output.
At this point it might be useful to zoom in and take a more detailed look at one of the Corn Belt counties. I once spent a lonely week in Hebron, Nebraska, the county seat of Thayer County, and it’s for that reason that I selected Thayer to illustrate how extensively its land has been dedicated to growing animal feed.
I stayed at the Riverside Motel in Hebron, NE It has a 4-star Google rating
Thayer County is located in the state’s southeast corner; its southern border also acting as the state line with Kansas. The county is similar in aspect and temperament to so many other Midwest counties: relatively flat with fertile soils and a temperate** climate that makes it conducive to agriculture. Many of the county’s 5,000-ish inhabitants can likely trace their ancestory to European emigrants who, in spite of their sturdy constitution, found the prairie almost impossible to cultivate because of the native vegetation’s tenacious root systems. John Deere, of tractor fame, made his fortune by devising a polished steel plow that would cut through the grassland soil (“sod-busting”), turning it over and exposing it to crop seeding, thus enabling homesteading and the subsequent conversion of millions of acres of Tallgrass Prairie into row-crop fields.
Sod-buster in Chief
The end of the fabled Tallgrass Prairie
and the beginning of modern agriculture
Below is a tableau for Thayer county. In the upper-left quadrant, a statewide view shows Thayer County’s location within the state of Nebraska. The main map, in turn, shows a countywide view where the gridded land ownership pattern appears. A small circle of that countywide view is then zoomed in further, showing the intense cultivated land use. The statistics panel in the upper-right quadrant enumerates the county’s dedication to producing animal feed. Note that less than two percent of the county grows stuff that people would directly eat.
By this point, I think that I’ve presented a pretty good case that we Americans utilize our most productive lands to produce food that is unfit for us to eat and instead destined for livestock feed.
But… So what?
Well, as John Muir said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." That’s the case here… there are many, many topics intertwined with growing crops for animal feed. Since time and space don’t allow a detailed discussion of each, I’ll present them in bullet form:
Human health: Feeding grain to livestock, particularly beef, doesn’t add much lean tissue. Instead, it adds fat to the meat, known as marbling. While this quickly puts a lot of weight on the animal (and hence profits to the grower!), that fat isn’t particularly good for our health; think cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity… While we’re at it, most Americans are getting twice as much protein as they need, but only 3% of Americans are eating the fiber they need.
Marbled meat
Lean meat
Water pollution: “The livestock sector is one of the top three contributors to the most serious environmental problems, including water-quality degradation, at every scale from local to global.”
~Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2017)
Freshwater: 70% of available freshwater goes toward growing food and raising animals. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/thirsty-food
Food Scarcity: Modern agricultural methods are feeding 70 billion farmed animals every year while almost a billion people - 1 out of 9 - are hungry or starving. Children are often the most affected. http://www1.wfp.org/zero-hunger
Wildlife: Almost 80,000 wild animals killed each year for predator protection for animal agriculture https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/160212-Wildlife-Services-predator-control-livestock-trapping-hunting
Economics: American taxpayers are subsidizing farmers to the tune of $46 billion (as of 2020) per year. https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-ag-subsidies-to-supply-39-of-farm-income
Soil degradation: This has profound implications for our future ability to farm the land: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-say-nations-corn-belt-has-lost-third-its-topsoil-180977485/
Animal ethics: Feeding grain to livestock isn’t all that nice to the animals involved. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/pollan.html
But wait, there’s more: The overuse of pesticides and herbicides, loss of biodiversity, marketing to convince people that they need to eat meat...
So in summary… America is using it’s most productive land to essentially grow fat that isn’t healthy for us, the animals that we eat, nor in turn the land itself – and at taxpayer expense.
*I don’t want to sound too negative about Nebraska. If you find the right place, it can have a pleasant charm: watching awesome lightning storms and equally-awesome lightning bugs at the same time, navigating a beer-laden canoe down the Niobrara River, and afternoon meadowlark calls in the achingly-lonely Sand Hills.
**Bullshit. As a descriptive term, “temperate” can only be applied when Midwest temperatures are averaged over a whole year. I know because I spent four years there; the place is brutally muggy in the summer, and desperately cold in the winter. Oh, and the wind blows continuously…