The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [18]
This part of Iowa has some of the richest soil in the world, a layer of cakey alluvial loam nearly two feet thick. The initial deposit was made by the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier ten thousand years ago, and then compounded at the rate of another inch or two every decade by prairie grasses—big bluestem, foxtail, needlegrass, and switchgrass. Tall-grass prairie is what this land was until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the sod was first broken by the settler’s plow. George’s grandfather moved his family to Iowa from Derbyshire, England, in the 1880s, a coal miner hoping to improve his lot in life. The sight of such soil, pushing up and then curling back down behind the blade of his plow like a thick black wake behind a ship, must have stoked his confidence, and justifiably so: It’s gorgeous stuff, black gold as deep as you can dig, as far as you can see. What you can’t see is all the soil that’s no longer here, having been blown or washed away since the sod was broken; the two-foot crust of topsoil here probably started out closer to four.
The story of the Naylor farm since 1919, when George’s grandfather bought it, closely tracks the twentieth-century story of American agriculture, its achievements as well as its disasters. It begins with a farmer supporting a family on a dozen different species of plants and animals. There would have been a fair amount of corn then too, but also fruits and other vegetables, as well as oats, hay, and alfalfa to feed the pigs, cattle, chickens, and horses—horses being the tractors of that time. One of every four Americans lived on a farm when Naylor’s grandfather arrived here in Churdan; his land and labor supplied enough food to feed his family and twelve other Americans besides. Less than a century after, fewer than 2 million Americans still farm—and they grow enough to feed the rest of us. What that means is that Naylor’s grandson, raising nothing but corn and soybeans on a fairly typical Iowa farm, is so astoundingly productive that he is, in effect, feeding some 129 Americans. Measured in terms of output per worker, American farmers like Naylor are the most productive humans who have ever lived.
Yet George Naylor is all but going broke—and he’s doing better than many of his neighbors. (Partly because he’s still driving that 1975 tractor.) For though this farm might feed 129, it can no longer support the four who live on it: The Naylor farm survives by the grace of Peggy Naylor’s paycheck (she works for a social services agency in Jefferson) and an annual subsidy payment from Washington, D.C. Nor can the Naylor farm literally feed the Naylor family, as it did in grandfather Naylor’s day. George’s crops are basically inedible—they’re commodities that must be processed or fed to livestock before they can feed people. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink: Like most of Iowa, which now imports 80 percent of its food, George’s farm (apart from his garden, his laying hens, and his fruit trees) is basically a food desert.
The 129 people who depend on George Naylor for their sustenance are all strangers, living at the far end of a food chain so long, intricate, and obscure that neither producer nor consumer has any reason to know the first thing about the other. Ask one of those eaters where their steak or soda comes from and she’ll tell you “the supermarket.” Ask George Naylor whom he’s growing all that corn for and he’ll tell you