|
| Looks like the article started the discussion it was meant to.
The idea was not to replace corn with vegetables though (I don't even remember that the article mentioned vegs at all) or to replace the whole corn system, but to improve the efficiency of producing calories for human consumption.
Free-range poultry and grass-fed cattle are great for other reasons, but as far as the article is concerned, would probably be a bigger "waste" of land, as feed is still the fastest and most efficient way to produce animal protein. Eating less meat, and especially less "red" meat could be part of the answer, as one pound of feed produces about 3 times more chicken meat than beef, but changing a whole nation's diet is no mean feat. The only thing(s) it has going for it is that it is also a health issue (many obese people are forced by their doctors to reduce red meat anyway), and as far as economics are concerned, chicken is much less expensive than beef.
Like @dt4020, I also noticed that the comparison with the number of people a corn field could feed directly was not really appropriate and even went against the whole argument of replacing some of the corn with more diverse crops. Plus most commercial corn is not "directly" edible for humans unless you wash it in lime for grits or like Mexicans do for masa flour.
Consumers will always ask for plentiful cheap food, but in the end, the market sets the price, not the consumer. I think most will agree that meat producers are currently struggling, and even before the higher price of feed, some were already producing at a loss, so it could be an opportunity to fix the problem. Probably requires more government intervention than most would like though, like ending free trade so that half price meat from countries with half the production cost and half the living expenses would compete on an equal basis. The ex-WTO agreements were excellent at the time Americans were exporter of technology, but have started to weigh on the economy as these other "consumer" nations develop and became producers: Free trade agreements work both ways, no tariff on exported goods, but none on imported goods either. I think that global commodity trading is also affecting the market artificially, so it's not just about tariffs, but what do I know?
The economics of farming seem to go against the economy, favoring more large farmers with less employees, making a revenue from crop insurance on bad years (and there's probably more of these to come with climate change) or a fortune in a good year. There's not enough water, mined underground or from rivers, to irrigate all lands, but where there is enough of it, it seems a waste not to use it. It makes all the difference between a 30 bpa crop and a 200 bpa on marginal dry land, 300 on good land with good practices. Up to 10 times less surface to cultivate for the same total production, and one more job on every few dozen acres. Can we still allow not to irrigate, or tile? And that's just for corn, in which the U.S. leads in yield. For wheat though, the U.S. has about half or even 3 times less yield than the top producers (usually rainy countries, but also more irrigated ones), so the U.S. could become a world leader in yield for many crops other than corn if the same amount of research and technology had been invested in them. | |
|
"It's time to rethink America's corn system"
