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———. Feeding the World (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2000).
Wargo, John. Our Children’s Toxic Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). An important work on the regulation and biology of pesticides.
For detailed information on individual pesticides, see the Web site of the Pesticide Action Network (www.panna.org). On atrazine, the herbicide most widely applied to U.S. cornfields, see Hayes, Tyrone, et al. “Atrazine-Induced Hermaphroditism at 0.1 PPB in American Frogs (Rana pipiens): Laboratory and Field Evidence,” Environmental Health Perspectives 3, no. 4 (April 2003), and Hayes, Tyrone B. “There Is No Denying This: Defusing the Confusion about Atrazine,” BioScience 54, no. 12 (December 2004).
On the question of industrial agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuel, there is a rich and somewhat daunting literature. Marty Bender, at the Land Institute, helped me to navigate a great many complexities as did David Pimentel at Cornell. The figure of 0.25 gallons of oil per bushel of corn comes from unpublished research by Ricardo Salvador (see his Web site, cited earlier); David Pimentel, et al., offers a figure of 0.33 gallons in “Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems,” BioScience 55, no. 7 (July 2005). For more on the general subject of energy use in agriculture, see chapter 9 following.
On the equally vexing topic of federal agriculture policy, I have had many fine tutors, foremost among them George Naylor himself, as well as the staff of the National Family Farms Coalition (www.nffc.net), of which he is president. Other sources for this material (which figures in chapter 3 as well) included:
Michael Duffy, Iowa State (www.sust.ag.iastate.edu/gpsa/faculty/duffy.html).
Daryll Ray, University of Tennesse Institute of Agriculture (www.agpolicy.org). See especially his report “Rethinking US Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Livelihoods Worldwide” (issued by the Institute’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center in September 2003 and available at www.agpolicy.org/blueprint.html).
Dan McGuire, American Corngrower’s Association (www.acga.org). McGuire generously shared his archive of documents on the history of U.S. agricultural policy since the 1930s.
Mark Ritchie, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (www.iatp.org). Other sources on the history of farm policy:
Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Critser summarizes the history of farm policy since the 1970s, linking it to the current surplus of food and the consequent epidemic of obesity.
Duscha, Julius. “Up, Up, Up: Butz Makes Hay Down on the Farm,” New York Times Magazine, April 16, 1972.
Rasmussen, Wayne D., and Gladys L. Baker. Price Support and Adjustment Programs from 1933 through 1978: A Short History (Washington, D.C.: USDA Economics, Statistics and Cooperatives Service, 1978).
Ritchie, Mark. The Loss of Our Family Farms: Inevitable Results or Conscious Policies? A Look at the Origins of Government Policies for Agriculture (Minneapolis: League of Rural Voters, 1979). Ritchie also shared with me his archive of policy statements by the Committee for Economic Development. The CED, an influential business group from the 1950s through the 1970s, led the campaign to dismantle New Deal farm policy. See their “Toward a Realistic Farm Program” (1967) and “A New U.S. Farm Policy for Changing World Food Needs” (1974).
———, et al. United States Dumping on World Agricultural Markets (Minneapolis: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 2003).
CHAPTER 3: THE ELEVATOR
My estimate of the portion of the U.S. corn crop that passes through the corporate hands of Cargill and ADM is based on Richard Manning’s reporting in Against the Grain (New York: North Point Press, 2004, p. 128) that ADM buys 12 percent of the nation’s corn crop, and on a 1999 estimate by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey