Formerly NE North Dakota, now NW MN | "Much of this fertilizer, along with large amounts of soil, washes into the nation’s lakes, rivers and coastal oceans, polluting waters and damaging ecosystems along the way. " -This statement reveals him.
"Much"- noun, 2. a great quantity, measure, or degree: exp. Much of his research was unreliable. [that's dictionary.com's example, not mine... ironically enough]
Does anyone here think "much" as in a large degree or percentage (more than half?) of your nitrogen is running off your fields?
So... that statement reveals him to be a well-spoken idiot. What exactly is he complaining about? My wife makes me eat vegetables... So I can attest- there are still plenty of veggies available in this country. Not only that, fruits and vegetables are affordable in this country. Americans spend a much smaller percentage of their income on food than every other nation on the planet, and a pretty substantial percentage (last I heard, something approaching a quarter) of our country gets food stamps. Americans have access to rabbit food, but they choose to consume meat.
When I was in college I heard numerous times that the largest state in the union for value of ag. production was California. Back then, no one else was even close. This idea that American Agriculture exists only in the corn belt, and that the entire North American continent is devoid of healthy food is both stupid and scientifically invalid.
I know I shouldn't get fired up by articles like that, but its increasingly hard not to. His article appears on a website for something called "Scientific American". He teaches at the same school NORMAN BORLAUG came from. Increasingly, this message that "the American diet is ALL your fault" is coming at us from people and places that aught to know better. It concerns me.
As to what I will call the "local issues" of growing corn (erosion, pesticides, water-consumption whatever else he says you corn guys do to destroy the earth after you pay 12k/ac. to own it), how ignorant do you have to be to think that wall-to-wall fruit and vegetable production won't be hampered with the same pitfalls? We raise two "vegetables" on our farm (dry beans and potatoes). I can assure you there are no fields more black and loose after harvesting than from those two crops. Dry bean fields are so flat and black you have to rip em or even a mild breeze makes dust. I know he's talking about raising cabbage and carrots and asparagus, not beans and potatoes, but how much water and fertilizer do you suppose carrots and cabbage take?
The most frustrating point that he, and many of the academics miss is that we aren't encapsulated in an American food system, we aren't even exclusively in a North American food system, we're part of a world food system and have a moral obligation to be. There's probably a bunch of other crops out there (switchgrass) that can create more calories/ac. than corn, but corn's pretty good making calories. There's a bunch of crops out there that maybe store better than corn (debatable I guess). But to find something that makes a lot of calories and is a good store of them, it's pretty hard to beat corn. The world food system needs mobile calories, and there's no crop better than corn for that, and there's no place on earth better at producing it than the corn-belt. |
"It's time to rethink America's corn system"
