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“The ones that are in it are getting bigger. You need to be a good size or you’ll get squeezed out.” 

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“The ones that are in it are getting bigger. You need to be a good size or you’ll get squeezed out.” 

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In this quote Ian and Curt were talking to some people around the small farm town of Greene, Iowa. In this portion they learned that one man and his family owned the majority of the farms in the area but it was others who worked on the farm and then got a small portion of the money. In 2013 the Department of Agriculture reported that smaller farms are consolidating with larger productions to better protect themselves from the swings of the market prices. It was found that large farms only represented 5.6% of all farms but control 53.7% of crop land (Koerth-Baker, 2016).

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“If you try to go out and grow an acre of corn without the help of the government, you will lose money.” 

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“If you try to go out and grow an acre of corn without the help of the government, you will lose money.” 

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This quote shows how dependent farmers in America has become on farm subsidies from the government. Ian and Curt wanted to grow just one acre of corn on a farm in Iowa and when going to set up their operation they were told that if they did not take help from the government they would most definitely lose money. The Economist reports that United State farm subsidies originally began by taking land out of production so that supply would be more equal to demand. This worked well for farmers for a long time but in the 70s it was decided that farmers would grow as much as they could, and the government would provide help to keep prices high so that farmers could make a living (Coburn, 2015).

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THE father of Major Major, a character in Catch 22, a novel by Joseph Heller, makes a good living not growing alfalfa. "The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce." Each day, Mr Major "sprang out of bed at the crack of noon... just to make certain that the chores would not be done."
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To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn't necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers' pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soyabeans in states such as Iowa.

Few politicians are inclined to vote against farm subsidies: though farmers make up only a small number of voters, even in agricultural states, they are loud and organised enough to punish lawmakers who vote against a farm bill. Opposition to spending is muted; few voters realise how much of their money is given to farmers and even fewer would change their vote because of it.

The 2014 bill, which passed with 68 votes in the Senate and comfortably in the House, at least nodded to reform. Most importantly Congress abolished direct payments based on land ownership. Instead, farmers now get more subsidised insurance, and new payments which are linked to past crop prices and productivity. Those not "actively engaged" in farming are in theory banned from collecting subsidies-though Congress delegated the task of defining who is really a farmer to Mr Vilsack's department.

This new system was meant to save around $23 billion over a decade-partly through cuts to food stamps for hard-up families, a welfare programme which, oddly, is administered by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). But because payments are linked to commodity prices and output, the new system could cost much more, says Vincent Smith, an agricultural economist at Montana State University. It could also get America into trouble with the World Trade Organisation if payments exceed certain thresholds.

Ominously, on February 10th the USDA predicted that net farm income would decline by 32% between 2014 and 2015. Commodities such as corn (which in America is used to produce everything from biofuel to syrup) and soya have become less valuable of late thanks to soaring supply and weak demand. Falling prices reduce the cost of subsidised crop insurance to the taxpayer (since less valuable crops cost less to insure). But those gains will be wiped out and more by the cost of compensating farmers for their lower incomes.

Any new rules designed to stop non-farmers from getting payments will be unlikely to work, predicts Mr Smith. While it may be possible to stop some landowners from claiming payments, they will adapt: "You hire a good agricultural lawyer and redefine the structure of the farm." Many landowners have already found their way around similar rules introduced in the farm bill of 2008, nominating young children as farmers, or claiming to be engaged in farming by providing management advice. Alfalfa non-growers still have bumper times ahead.

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THE father of Major Major, a character in Catch 22, a novel by Joseph Heller, makes a good living not growing alfalfa. "The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce."

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“Corn originated in southern Mexico, it traveled and made its way to Iowa and now only one species of corn is popular.” 

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“Corn originated in southern Mexico, it traveled and made its way to Iowa and now only one species of corn is popular.” 

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Once corn made its way to Iowa it had a new home. The crop grows so well there because of the winter climate and humid summers. Through years of gene selecting by farmers the most commonly grown corn in the United States is Yellow Dent. This yellow dent corn is the most popular variety of the crop and many hybrids are derived using it as a base. Yellow dent is so popular because it has a high starch and vitamin A content making it perfect for different use (Heartland Science, 2015).

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Yellow Dent Corn differs from the "sweet" corn served as a vegetable in several ways. Sweet corn is full of sugar and softens readily when heated. Sweet corn can even been eaten off the husk in a corn field. But Yellow Dent Corn has a very thick outer skin that does not soften when cooked but must be soaked or ground for processing.

Corn has been a native crop in the Americas for over 7,000 years, and is said to have been brought to Spain by Christopher Columbus.
Find out more...

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James L. Reid developed Yellow Dent Corn, the most popular variety of field corn grown world-wide during much of the 20th Century. Most of today's hybrid corns were derived from Yellow Dent. Dent Corn originally was created by crossing flint and floury corns.

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"Any juice that says ‘sweetened’ that’s high fructose corn syrup.” 

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"Any juice that says ‘sweetened’ that’s high fructose corn syrup.” 

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This was a quote from the same professor that tested the samples of Ian and Curt’s hair. As the two were walking through the super market and looking at labels on food packages they were finding that corn or a byproduct of corn, such as high fructose corn syrup, was in almost everything they picked up. The Washington Post reports that the United States is the largest producer and consumer of corn by far and is in everything from the meat we eat to the sodas we drink. The list of foods that contain some kind of corn product is so long that it would be easier to list foods that don’t contain any trace amounts of corn (Ferdman, 2015).

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In 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with a handful of revelations and a pocket full of corn seeds. He had learned about many things during his travels to the New World, but few were as exciting as the promising grain he had encountered for the first time. It was unfamiliar; it was delicious; it was, as Columbus romanticized at the time, "affixed by nature in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas," and it could, if they learned to farm it properly, help feed a lot of people.

The only problem was that Columbus had left behind a fairly important bit of information. "He didn't take back the knowledge of how to process it," said Betty Fussell, the author of " The Story of Corn," which chronicles the grain's several-thousand-year history. "That might sound innocuous, but it probably changed the course of history."

Over the next few hundred years, most of Europe grew to misunderstand corn rather than embrace it. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the grain endured a different fate: It thrived, and eventually found its way to the very center of the American diet.

Today, the United States is the largest producer and consumer of corn - and by a long shot. Corn is in the sodas Americans drink and the potato chips they snack on; it's in hamburgers and french fries, sauces and salad dressings, baked goods, breakfast cereals, virtually all poultry, and even most fish. The grain is so ubiquitous that it would take longer to list the foods that contain traces of it than to pinpoint the ones that don't. "Our entire diet has been colonized by this one plant," Michael Pollan told National Public Radio in 2003.

But corn wasn't always so omnipresent. It took time for European settlers to warm to corn and, most importantly, a coalescence of fortunate events for it to sprout into an industrial behemoth.
[In defense of corn, the world's most important food crop]
The choo-choo grain

Until the 1800s, corn was eaten mostly by the poor. It was a cheap and prolific crop, consumed by farmers and fed to prisoners. And it was also used as a commodity. As Pollan wrote in his poignant 2006 book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," corn "was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America."

But then came the industrial revolution, and with it three essential technologies that helped propel the grain from the diets of the impoverished to dining tables all over the country.

The first was an iron plow, which allowed farmers to sow deep into the soil, and on much larger scales. The Midwest was planted with corn on a commercial basis precisely because of this new, simple but revolutionary tool. Two other advancements had an equally large effect, even though they touched corn production more tangentially.

"One of the most important boons for corn might have been that the commercial farms in the Midwest grew up at the same time as the canneries and railroads," Fussell said.

Until then, corn was mainly distributed locally. But the rise of trains, which moved the harvest well beyond county limits, and the advent of canning, which meant it could keep for much longer, allowed farmers to grow with hundreds of thousands of mouths in mind. In the coming decades, the amount of land dedicated to corn grew incredibly quickly. It would be another half-century, however, until corn made its way to the center of the American diet.
[How to grill corn so you get it right every time]
Help from science and price

Corn is what Fussell calls a genetic monster, because it's highly adaptable and easily manipulated. And there is, perhaps, no better example of its mutant-like qualities than what happened shortly after the turn of the 20th century.

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists discovered a way to boost corn production to a level that was previously unthinkable. They bred hybrid strains that had larger ears and could be grown closer together, which allowed farmers to produce a lot more corn without more land. The discovery, coupled with the introduction of new industrial fertilizers and more efficient farm tools, such as tractors, led to a thunderous rise in output.

In the following decades, "the number of bushels of corn per acre doubled, and then continued to rise each year," as Paul Roberts wrote in his 2009 book " The End of Food." Corn yields have risen ever since, with only brief interruptions due to sporadic droughts, interruptions that farmers are countering with further engineered corn.

Advancements in farming technology and science paved the way for corn's ascent in the American food system, but what has allowed for corn to seep into just about every food Americans eat today is that, above all, it is inexpensive.

"Corn has and always will be cheap, because it grows everywhere in the world," said Fussell.

At present, a bushel of corn costs about $4 - less than half the price of soybeans, and a good deal less than wheat. And the price is falling.

[Today's botany lesson: a graphic on corn sex]
What we grow, what we eat

The most incredible thing about the corn grown in America today is how little of it we actually eat.

Less than 10 percent of the corn used in the United States is directly ingested by humans. The bulk is either turned into ethanol, for use as fuel, or fed to the hundreds of millions of animals we raise. Cows, chickens, pigs and even fish, which are fed pellets made largely of corn, eat several times the amount of the grain consumed by people each year.

The relative cheapness of corn and general usefulness of it as a form of energy - both for living animals and living, more generally - have proved important enough that the government subsidizes its production to the tune of some $4.5 billion each year. The result is perpetuation of ambitious growing goals: Farmers, realizing that the more efficient they are, the more money they will get, grow more and more corn. The more corn there is, the lower its price, and the greater the incentive to use it in as many ways as possible.

To talk about corn without talking about the different varieties would be to overlook an important facet of its ubiquity in the United States. There are many types, but the most commonly eaten forms can be divided into three general categories.

The first, which is perhaps the most romanticized, is sweet corn. Sweet corn is what Americans grill in the summer, and boil or bake during the rest of the year. It's eaten on the cob. It gets stuck in your teeth. And it accounts for only about 1 percent of the corn grown in America.

Flint corn, which has a soft center and harder outer shell, is what most people know as popcorn. It became popular in the 1960s after Jiffy Pop, which cooked the kernels in aluminum foil on the stovetop, was introduced, and rose further in the 1970s and 1980s, shortly after the introduction of the microwave. Today, much like sweet corn, flint accounts for a steady but comparatively insignificant portion of the U.S. corn crop.

And then there's dent corn, a.k.a. field corn, the most important kinds. It accounts for the vast majority of corn grown in America today, as well as the vast majority of the corn Americans eat. It's in most animals we eat, because it's fed to most animals we raise for slaughter; it's in most of the beverages we drink, because high-fructose corn syrup, which is derived from flint corn, is the most commonly used commercial sweetener; it's even in our cheese, because our cows munch on it instead of grazing on grass.

It's largely invisible, in other words, but also virtually inseparable from the American diet.

"People have this kind of nostalgic understanding of corn," said Fussell. "They think of corn on the cob and popcorn. But the truth is that field corn is what we are really talking about when we talk about the dominance of corn in the United States."

"It's in almost every product in the supermarket today," she said. "That's no exaggeration."

In many ways, Europe still scoffs at the grain that defines the American food system. The old world is a wheat culture, Fussell says. But the truth is that corn's ubiquity in the United States has, in turn, boosted its popularity elsewhere. American-style processed food, which almost always relies on corn, touches countries all around the globe.

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How corn made its way into just about everything we eat

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In 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Europe with a handful of revelations and a pocket full of corn seeds. He had learned about many things during his travels to the New World, but few were as exciting as the promising grain he had encountered for the first time.

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“This is the first time in history that our lifespan is shorter than that of our parents, and it's all because of what we eat.”  

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“This is the first time in history that our lifespan is shorter than that of our parents, and it's all because of what we eat.”  

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This statement made by Ian at the beginning of the movie is what started their journey in growing their own acre of corn. After speaking to a professor that tested the molecules in their hair it was found that the majority of the carbon in their bodies was coming from corn and that the foods we eat bioaccumulate and can later be found in our genes. In an article for Comprehensive Food Science and Food Safety Reviews it is reported that corn is the leading cereal crop around the world and the effects of it in our bodies can cause potential health problems in colon health and mineral absorption (Ai, 2016).

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