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| It would be blowing into the wind tilting at a virtual windmill, but I'd like to say:
!. He's jealous of corn farmers investing in ethanol plants to INCREASE the demand for corn and to make it worth growing for a profit, instead of selling it annually for less than the cost of production. It wasn't big government that invested in ethanol, it was corn farmers. Government followed.
2. He hasn't tried to grow wheat in a humid climate, we don't grow wheat in most of Iowa because of too many fungi that wreck the crop.
3. Ditto on massive vegetables, we don't have a long enough season or a close enough market to justify 10,000 sections growing lettuce.
4. Much of the world that knew corn two centuries ago did eat the corn direct. Corn porridge, polenta, corn bread, flat bread (tacos), parched corn, and most humans preferred wheat products when available, AND MEAT. Seems like we miss out on having super sized grinding molars and multiple stomachs for processing hard grains efficiently and comfortably.
5. While field corn can be eaten one day a year as sweet corn, what is commercially grown for sweet corn is considerably different from field corn, bred to keep its sweet more than ten minutes after harvest.
6. He ought to notice that in his favored Bangladesh, a very large portion of the available labor force supplies muscle for farming, and those that buy food pay a much larger fraction of their wage income on food to survive than in the US were farmers are a smaller portion of the population than in any of the developing world and US citizens pay a much smaller portion of their income on healthy and tasty food with very much greater variety.
7. And those hand laborers (slaves some might say) DO produce as much or more pollution in the form of CO2, sweat, body odor, and effluents as our machinery. Effluents that often contain serious human disease organisms but still are often used to fertilize food crops. And from conception to productive age it takes at least half a decade, more like a whole decade where the future slave isn't productive but a consumer of food, water, and oxygen while still producing what some define as pollution products. When they do use animals for greater power needs those animals produce those same pollution products 24/7 year round and consume food 24/7 year round.
8. Let him find out if his hands fit the handle of a hoe. I think he would conclude rapidly that his hands fit the computer keyboard much better than a hoe. Especially after the first month in the field with nothing growing but callouses on hands and feet to show for his labor.
Gerald J. | |
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"It's time to rethink America's corn system"
