The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [22]
Today Churdan is virtually a ghost town, much of its main street shuttered. The barbershop, a food market, and the local movie theater have all closed in recent years; there’s a café and one sparsely stocked little market somehow still hanging on, but most people drive the ten miles to Jefferson to buy their groceries or pick up milk and eggs when they’re getting gas at the Kum & Go. The middle school can no longer field a baseball team or put together a band, it has so few students left, and it takes four local high schools to field a single football team: the Jefferson-Scranton-Paton-Churdan Rams. Just about the only going concern left standing in Churdan is the grain elevator, rising at the far end of town like a windowless concrete skyscraper. It endures because, people or no people, the corn keeps coming, more of it every year.
4. THERE GOES THE SUN
I’ve oversimplified the story a bit; corn’s rapid rise is not quite as self-propelled as I’ve made it sound. As in so many other “self-made” American successes, the closer you look the more you find the federal government lending a hand—a patent, a monopoly, a tax break—to our hero at a critical juncture. In the case of corn, the botanical hero I’ve depicted as plucky and ambitious was in fact subsidized in crucial ways, both economically and biologically. There’s a good reason I met farmers in Iowa who don’t respect corn, who will tell you in disgust that the plant has become “a welfare queen.”
The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”
Hybrid corn turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of this conversion. Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. For though the new hybrids had the genes to survive in teeming cities of corn, the richest acre of Iowa soil could never have fed thirty thousand hungry corn plants without promptly bankrupting its fertility. To keep their land from getting “corn sick” farmers in Naylor’s father’s day would carefully rotate their crops with legumes (which add nitrogen to the soil), never growing corn more than twice in the same field every five years; they would also recycle nutrients by spreading their cornfields with manure from their livestock. Before synthetic fertilizers the amount of nitrogen in the soil strictly limited the amount of corn an acre of land could support. Though hybrids were introduced in the thirties, it wasn’t until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields exploded.
The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything—not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted. All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life