Corn: The Welfare Crop

The environmental and economic travesty of subsidized crops

“Big Ag” in the United States has little to do with supplying people with needed food and much to do with using political force to perpetuate profits at the expense of consumers and biodiversity.

If your farm grows corn and sells it locally to people who actually eat your produce, this article is not pointed at you! (Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash)

Let me preface this story by saying that it is neither meant to be disparaging to those who work the land nor of corn itself. My intent is to highlight corn as a prime example of how corporate farming practices, combined with coercive lobbying and unsustainable subsidies, are disrupting our economy and environment in favor of special interests.

“It is important to distinguish corn the crop from corn the system. As a crop, corn is highly productive, flexible and successful. It has been a pillar of American agriculture for decades, and there is no doubt that it will be a crucial part of American agriculture in the future. However, many are beginning to question corn as a system: how it dominates American agriculture compared with other farming systems; how in America it is used primarily for ethanol, animal feed, and high-fructose corn syrup; how it consumes natural resources; and how it receives preferential treatment from our government.” — Jonathan Foley at Scientific American

Corn ear photo by Peter Griffin

If you’ve driven through the Midwestern United States, your mind may have wondered at the incomprehensibly vast expanses of cornfields. If you haven’t, believe me, it’s staggering. Upon witnessing this, your natural assumption might be to think the demand for corn is just that huge. As you stopped for fuel and noticed an ethanol warning label, you may have further guessed all that corn is helping the environment by lessening our reliance on fossil fuels. Sadly, neither of those assumptions would be correct. Despite its color, not much is “green” about modern corn production.

Now, corn is certainly a useful crop that people have grown for a long time. From obvious uses like corn chips and breakfast cereals to less-thought-of ingredients such as sorbitol in our toothpaste, Americans voluntarily select quite a bit of corn and its derivatives on the free market. All of that is fine and good — farms that grow the crops people actually want reflect all that is good in our economy.

However, something has gone horribly wrong along the way, because much of our current corn usage no longer stems from voluntary selection. Currently, supply and demand are artificially manipulated through government interference in the market, so we have no way of pinpointing how much corn would still be produced without these coercive measures. However, it is surely much less than what is being traded at present.

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

The Economic Problem

In one form or another, corn has been a part of American agriculture since long before anyone called it the New World. In the late 1800s, more farmers began converting to corn as their primary crop in hopes that the higher yields would offset some of the risks associated with farming. Until the mid-1900s, yields of around 20–30 bushels per acre remained fairly constant. However, in the past 70 years, modern science and industry have been applied to corn farming methods and yields have skyrocketed to 170 bushels or more per acre. On the surface, this would seem to be good news, but that’s not how things have worked out.

As you might imagine, the agricultural industry has invested a great deal into maximizing corn profits. What with experimenting to find the most productive methods, finding more effective fertilizers, building larger machinery, and buying politicians, “Big Ag” has laid out a great deal of money in a very focused manner.

Much of that may sound reasonable (hey, people have to eat, right?), but the situation has gone light-years past simply producing corn for your local market. You see, all of this research and development has made corn an easy go-to crop for anyone with a mind to grow it commercially. As a result, there are a lot more farmers growing corn than there are people wanting to buy it.

Photo by Dietmar Reichle on Unsplash

Normally, the market would correct a surplus by deflating prices through competition, thereby reducing the incentive to continue ramping up production. Not so with corn (and a handful of other crops, like soybeans, but we’ll keep this story about corn).

With so much invested, US agricultural interests have proven unwilling to limit production to simply meet consumers’ voluntary needs. Neither are they willing to suffer market prices to dip too low. Once production outstripped demand, Big Ag turned to lobbyists to prop up their industry and coerce everyone else to consume more and more of their unwanted surplus, and this has been going on for quite some time now.

Consumers are so used to seeing high-fructose corn syrup on their food labels and vehicles designed to withstand the damage from ethanol combustion that most of us just automatically assume that these products came about for good reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. Corn has made its way into an insidious number of products because we have been desperately scrambling to find uses for staggering amounts of unwanted corn, forced upon us by vested interests unwilling to inconvenience themselves by switching to more ethical crops.

Photo by Kamlesh Hariyani on Unsplash

Rampant subsidies are essentially corporate welfare.

Again, it is impossible to know just how much corn would find a home in a market not being artificially manipulated by subsidies and coercive government regulation. Even if we generously include livestock feed as a voluntary demand (even though corn is an unnatural ingredient for many of the animals that receive it, and it would likely be a less prevalent choice in a truly free market), it would be naive to think that our volume of overproduction is anything short of staggering.

To gain some idea, though, let’s use the known amount of corn subsidies as a benchmark. This seems fair, as the ostensible reason for propping something up with subsidies is because it might not be produced otherwise.

Corn subsidies in the United States totaled $113.9 billion from 1995–2019. Considering a bushel of corn goes for well under two dollars, this equates to over 75 BILLION cubic feet of corn that probably would not have been produced if corporate growers knew they were limited by consumer demand. 75,000,000,000 cubic feet may be hard to conceptualize, so let me put it another way…

• If poured evenly onto every mile of our interstate highway system (20 mi²), the pile would be as high as a 13-story building.
• If you were to pile that much corn as high as a house (14'), the pile would cover 53,571 city blocks.
• You could make a pile the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza out of that much corn- and then make another 821 pyramids of the same size.

This is a ludicrous surplus, paid for entirely with tax dollars, for the sole benefit of a minority of farming businesses determined to grow what is convenient for them instead of fostering a healthy economy and environment by producing crops that people want or need. This is corporate welfare of the highest order.

The reason corn is in an obscene amount of your daily products, from beverages to diapers to your fuel tank, is NOT primarily because these are sound production choices. These ingredients are a desperate scramble to find something, anything, to do with the rampant overproduction your tax dollars have already paid for.

Map representing which states receive the most corn subsidies, courtesy of the Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database, with darker colors indicating more monies received.

E85 fuel pump photo by Mariordo CC BY-SA 3.0

The Ethanol Lie

If you’ve never researched this topic, you may be thinking all of this extra corn is a good thing because corn-based ethanol decreases our reliance on fossil fuels. It is important for us to burst this bubble.

As tempting as it is to go on a long tirade about this, I am going to limit myself to some key bullet points and then give you some links if you would like to know more. In the fewest words, the use of ethanol as a motor fuel is bad for our vehicles, bad for our economy, and bad for the environment.

“The United State desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future, but producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products.” — Dr. David Pimentel, professor emeritus of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University

A few high points…

1. Ethanol fuel is a net energy-loss product. It takes 131,000 BTUs of energy to produce and convert corn into a gallon of ethanol. When burned, that same gallon only produces 77,000 BTUs. Every time a gallon of ethanol is created, 54,000 BTUs of energy is completely wasted.
2. If every car in the US were to be running pure corn-based ethanol, it would require around 97% of our nation’s land area to produce the necessary amount of corn. Since ethanol is a net loss product, we would still have to burn fossil fuels in order to accomplish such a ridiculous task.
3. You could feed seven people for a year on the corn it would take to fuel a single car during the same time period.

“Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation’s energy security, its agriculture, economy or the environment. Ethanol production requires large fossil energy input, and therefore, it is contributing to oil and natural gas imports and U.S. deficits.” — Dr. David Pimentel, as reported by the Cornell Chronicle

If all you have ever heard is that corn-based biofuel is somehow a boon to our economy or environment, I’m sure the above points may come as a shock. Trust me, we are just scratching the surface. I encourage you to take a few moments to continue reading about this issue (I’ve included several excellent links at the end of this story).

It should be stressed that the people objecting to this infuriating use of an unwanted product are not just a few kooks in the shadows. The science and math are well-established on this issue. Corn-based biofuels are not helping consumers or the environment. The sole beneficiary is an agricultural industry that intentionally pulls the wool over people’s eyes while greasing a lot of political wheels in order to force you to consume products you never asked for and have already paid for with your tax dollars.

“Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning.” — Dr. David Pimentel, as reported by ScienceDaily

Photo by no one cares on Unsplash

The Environmental Impact

Honestly, the horrific effects of modern corn production on the environment are my real concern. Everything I have told you up to this point is simply to remove the excuse that “it may be an ecological disaster, but people have to eat (or drive).” That’s not what’s going on here.

The problem with subsidized overproduction is that a segment of the agricultural community wants to put on overalls and call themselves the salt of the earth, all the while pillaging the earth and begging for handouts to grow superfluous crops.

It would be nice if the economic problems were the only issue. Sadly, though, a much deeper price is being paid by the land, the people, and the organisms that share our planet.

Photo illustrating the unhealthy algal blooms that can result from nutrient pollution, photo by the EPA

To be fair, corn is not the only environmental offender when it comes to modern agricultural practices. There are serious flaws with our current ag practices which are shared across all large-scale producers. If you’ve never studied the natural makeup of soil or the commensal nature of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms, please start now. A multitude of delicate balances work together in a natural ecosystem, and these are ignored and destroyed by our current high-input monoculture ag model. What’s more, the consolidation of farmland into fewer and larger corporations just compounds these issues.

Many people assume we need these modern farming techniques because of overpopulation, but that’s not the case. World hunger is a result of poverty and maldistribution of food, not of underproduction. In other words, hunger is a political and economic problem rather than a sign that we need to ramp up production.

If anything, the degradation of our ecosystems through ecologically-unsound land-use practices and government subsidies exacerbates these issues. It increases wealth disparity, decreases social justice, and reduces the productivity of affected lands and waters not owned by the industrial complex. It is critical that we stop propping up the polluters and shift to sustainable production models.

Conventional high-input agriculture gives rise to biological problems related to the breakdown of the self-sustaining recycling characteristic normal to living systems by reducing saprophytes, humus return, and nitrogen fixing organisms. Thus, the system becomes increasingly dependent on greater inputs. In addition, reduced diversification often leads to an increase in plant and animal diseases, and pest and weed problems.

These are countered by increased applications of manufactured inputs which may cause agro-industry pollution and further breakdown of the system. An alternative which may reduce or eliminate some of these problems is ecological agriculture. — “Problems of modern agriculture,” M.Kiley-Worthington

Photo by Jorge Pena on Unsplash

While many of these problems hold true across a variety of crops, it is particularly unfortunate that corn is king in the US. Corn consumes a disproportionate amount of water, leading to problems like the depletion of the Ogalalla aquifer, which is forecast to be exhausted by the year 2030. Corn has a particularly high demand for nitrogenous fertilizers, contributing to hypoxic conditions in our watersheds. There are many more problems with our corn system, but we’ll just focus on one huge problem before we wrap up.

Take a look at this satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico and take a moment to comprehend the vast amount of runoff pictured.

Satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico. Light-colored water shows nutrient-rich sediment flowing into the deeper ocean water. These nutrients facilitate the growth of phytoplankton blooms, which can lead to hypoxic conditions. Image courtesy of NASA

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is an area of highly turbid waters which may include large blooms of phytoplankton extending from the mouth of the Mississippi River all the way to the Texas coast. When these blooms die and sink to the bottom, bacterial decomposition strips oxygen from the surrounding water, creating an environment very difficult for marine life to survive in.

You may have read this article from 2017, which reported the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone reaching record proportions (comparable in size to New Jersey). Well, the Dead Zone is still setting records, and there is not much reason to assume this trend will reverse itself until we get a handle on our agricultural methods. As you can see in the USDA map below, there is a huge amount of agricultural activity concentrated in the Mississippi watershed.

Crop production map of the US, showing a concentration of planted lands located inside the Mississippi River watershed, courtesy of the USDA

Many of these farms, instead of cooperating with the natural world and practicing sustainable agriculture, have long since stripped the land of nutrients. Consequently, they apply copious amounts of manmade nutrients to keep their productivity levels as high as possible.

One primary offender in this process is nitrogen fertilizers, which corn has a voracious appetite for. Phosphates are another huge factor. Together with other high-input ag products, these form nutrient pollution. Pesticides and herbicides also cause additional problems but are outside the scope of this article.

Here’s a warning from the Environmental Protection Agency:

Nutrient pollution is one of America’s most widespread, costly, and challenging environmental problems, and is caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the air and water. Too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle. Some algal blooms are harmful to humans because they produce elevated toxins and bacterial growth that can make people sick if they come into contact with polluted water, consume tainted fish or shellfish, or drink contaminated water.

Severe algae bloom, a common effect of nutrient pollution (photo by Michael Meiters)

Here’s another warning from the National Ocean Service:

“Nutrient pollution is the process where too many nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus, are added to bodies of water and can act like fertilizer, causing excessive growth of algae. Severe algal growth blocks light that is needed for plants, such as seagrasses, to grow. When the algae and seagrass die, they decay. In the process of decay, the oxygen in the water is used up and this leads to low levels of dissolved oxygen in the water. This, in turn, can kill fish, crabs, oysters, and other aquatic animals.”

We must find ways to reduce nutrient pollution. It is harming our health and the livelihood of those who rely on coastal waterways. More than that, it is degrading our planet and the problem is getting worse.

We cannot keep propping up unsustainable agriculture with tax dollars while ignoring everything downstream. The organisms in our waterways and marine life in the Gulf are suffering because of this profit-over-all-else policy.

This is a satellite image of the Mississippi delta hypoxia, which is thought to occur from nutrient overloading from farms along the Mississippi River. Reds and oranges represent high concentrations of phytoplankton and river sediment. Photograph by Goddard SVS, NASA

What You Should Take Away From All This

The hypocrisy of this paradigm is infuriating. Industrial growers hide behind a banner of “reliance on the land” while simultaneously being one of its major polluters. At the same time, they market themselves as shining examples of independence while demanding a ceaseless stream of government hand-outs. We need to stop buying into this charade. Our respect and patronage should instead go to the genuinely independent and sustainable farms still out there.

I’d love to go on about this issue for longer than anyone would read. Instead, I am going to hope you’re getting the gist by now and decide to educate yourself further about the serious flaws with our modern industrial farming practices. For now, try to remember these points:

1. We need to stop pretending our high-input corn overproduction is necessary or helpful. Industrial farmers grow corn because it is convenient and profitable for them, not because there is a corn shortage.
2. We need to get rid of corn-based biofuel entirely. Ethanol is purely an attempt to burn off all the corn overproduction that is poisoning our environment.
3. We need to be selecting food products free from high-fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup is in a staggering amount of foods because government subsidies foster overproduction, artificially lowering prices and skewing the marketplace in favor of an inferior product.
4. We need to be taking nutrient pollution seriously. Modern industrial farming is hurting us and the planet, and our fostering this system with tax dollars just adds insult to injury.

You can start your education with the curated links below. You can also raise awareness by sharing this story to your social media accounts. It took a while for us to get where we are, and it will take us a while to get back on the right path. We must stop ignoring this problem. As long as no one is speaking up, nothing will change.

The shortlink to this article is bit.ly/welfarecorn

Oh, and don’t forget to follow The Natural World for more great content about living in a sustainable manner and helping humankind become more ecologically-friendly!

The Natural World

Skeptical about the information presented in this story? Just want to learn more about this issue? Take some time to look through these resources!

It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System

For a deeper look at farm subsidies and how they got where they are now, check out this great article:

Our crazy farm subsidies, explained

If you’re stuck thinking industrial agriculture is what feeds the world, that large farms are more efficient, or that we must concentrate more farming on less land as the human population increases, take a moment to read this:

3 Big Myths about Modern Agriculture

For some historical perspective and insights into the impacts of modern farming, read this fact sheet from the Cornell Extension Service:

Modern Agriculture: Its Effects on the Environment

Excellent articles about biofuel issues:

Ethanol fuel from corn faulted as ‘unsustainable subsidized food burning’ in an analysis by Cornell scientist

Issues Relating to Biofuels

Biofuel: Bad for the Environment?

The Case Against More Ethanol: It’s Simply Bad for Environment

It’s Final — Corn Ethanol Is Of No Use

More scientific articles about biofuel

US crop production data from the USDA

The Mississippi River Hypoxic Zone:

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone

Massive 8,000-mile ‘dead zone’ could be one of the gulf’s largest

Other issues with corn and modern agriculture

Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture

The Problems of Industrial Agriculture, Now and for the Future | Frontier Group

Community health risks of industrial agriculture

6 Reasons Why High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is Bad for You

Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies

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