Rethinking America’s Corn System

So why do we, as a nation, grow so much corn?

The main rea­son is that corn is such a pro­duc­tive and ver­sa­tile crop, respond­ing to invest­ments in research, breed­ing and pro­mo­tion. It has incred­i­bly high yields com­pared with most other U.S. crops, and it grows nearly any­where in the coun­try, espe­cially thriv­ing in the Midwest and Great Plains. Plus, it can be turned into a stag­ger­ing array of prod­ucts. Corn can be used for food as corn flour, corn­meal, hominy, grits or sweet corn. It can be used as ani­mal feed to help fat­ten our hogs, chick­ens and cat­tle. And it can be turned into ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup or even bio-based plastics.

No won­der we grow so much of the stuff.

But 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.

The cur­rent corn sys­tem is not a good thing for America for four major reasons.

The American Corn System Is Inefficient at Feeding People.

Most peo­ple would agree that the pri­mary goal of agri­cul­ture should be feed­ing peo­ple. While other goals—especially pro­duc­ing income, cre­at­ing jobs and fos­ter­ing rural development—are crit­i­cally impor­tant too, the ulti­mate suc­cess of any agri­cul­tural sys­tem should be mea­sured in part by how well it deliv­ers food to a grow­ing pop­u­la­tion. After all, feed­ing peo­ple is why agri­cul­ture exists in the first place.

While U.S. corn is a highly pro­duc­tive crop, with typ­i­cal yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the result­ing deliv­ery of food by the corn sys­tem is far lower. Today’s corn crop is mainly used for bio­fu­els (roughly 40 per­cent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as ani­mal feed (roughly 36 per­cent of U.S. corn, plus dis­tillers grains left over from ethanol pro­duc­tion, is fed to cat­tle, pigs and chick­ens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny frac­tion of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.

Yes, the corn fed to ani­mals does pro­duce valu­able food to peo­ple, mainly in the form of dairy and meat prod­ucts, but only after suf­fer­ing major losses of calo­ries and pro­tein along the way. For corn-fed ani­mals, the effi­ciency of con­vert­ing grain to meat and dairy calo­ries ranges from roughly 3 per­cent to 40 per­cent, depend­ing on the ani­mal pro­duc­tion sys­tem in ques­tion. What this all means is that lit­tle of the corn crop actu­ally ends up feed­ing American peo­ple. It’s just math. The aver­age Iowa corn­field has the poten­tial to deliver more than 15 mil­lion calo­ries per acre each year (enough to sus­tain 14 peo­ple per acre, with a 3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn our­selves), but with the cur­rent allo­ca­tion of corn to ethanol and ani­mal pro­duc­tion, we end up with an esti­mated 3 mil­lion calo­ries of food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat prod­ucts, enough to sus­tain only 3 peo­ple per acre. This is lower than the aver­age deliv­ery of food calo­ries from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam.

In short, the corn crop is highly pro­duc­tive, but the corn sys­tem is aligned to feed cars and ani­mals instead of feed­ing people.

There are a num­ber of ways to improve the deliv­ery of food from the nation’s corn sys­tem. First and fore­most, shift­ing corn away from bio­fu­els would gen­er­ate more food for the world, lower demand for grain, lessen com­mod­ity price pres­sures, and reduce the bur­den on con­sumers around the world. Furthermore, eat­ing less corn-fed meat, or shift­ing corn toward more effi­cient dairy, poul­try, pork and grass-fed beef sys­tems, would allow us to get more food from each bushel of corn. And diver­si­fy­ing the Corn Belt into a wider mix of agri­cul­tural sys­tems, includ­ing other crops and grass-fed ani­mal oper­a­tions, could pro­duce sub­stan­tially more food— and a more diverse and nutri­tious diet— than the cur­rent system.

The Corn System Uses a Large Amount of Natural Resources.

Even though it does not deliver as much food as com­pa­ra­ble sys­tems around the globe, the American corn sys­tem con­tin­ues to use a large pro­por­tion of our country’s nat­ural resources.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Ensia.com.