The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [30]
A blockish fellow in his fifties, with a seed cap perched over a graying crew cut, Billy seemed cheerful enough, especially considering he’d just blown his morning fiddling with a broken tractor cable. While he and George were working on it I checked out the shed full of state-of-the-art farm equipment and asked him what he thought about the Bt corn he was planting—corn genetically engineered to produce its own pesticide. Billy thought the seed was the greatest. “I’m getting 220 bushels an acre on that seed,” he boasted. “How’s that compare, George?”
George owned he was getting something just south of two hundred, but he was too polite to say what he knew, which was that he was almost certainly clearing more money per acre growing less corn more cheaply. But in Iowa, bragging rights go to the man with the biggest yield, even if it’s bankrupting him.
In a shed across the way I noticed the shiny chrome prow of a tractor trailer poking out and asked Billy about it. He explained he’d had to take on long-distance hauling work to keep the farm afloat. “Have to drive the big rig to pay for all my farm toys,” he chuckled.
George tossed me a look, as if to say, kind of pathetic, isn’t it? Poignant seemed more like it, to think what this farmer had to do to hold on to his farm. I was reminded of Thoreau’s line: “Men have become the tools of their tools.” And I wondered if Billy gave much thought, in those late-night hours rolling up the miles on Interstate 80, to how he got to this point, and about who he was really working for now. The bank? John Deere? Monsanto? Pioneer? Cargill? Two hundred and twenty bushels of corn is an astounding accomplishment, yet it didn’t do Billy nearly as much good as it did those companies.
And then of course there’s the corn itself, which if corn could form an opinion would surely marvel at the absurdity of it all—and at its great good fortune. For corn has been exempted from the usual rules of nature and economics, both of which have rough mechanisms to check any such wild, uncontrolled proliferation. In nature, the population of a species explodes until it exhausts its supply of food; then it crashes. In the market, an oversupply of a commodity depresses prices until either the surplus is consumed or it no longer makes sense to produce any more of it. In corn’s case, humans have labored mightily to free it from either constraint, even if that means going broke growing it, and consuming it just as fast as we possibly can.
THREE
THE ELEVATOR
On the spring afternoon I visited the grain elevator in Farnhamville, Iowa, where George Naylor hauls his corn each October, the sky was a soft gray, drizzling lightly. Grain elevators, the only significant verticals for miles around in this part of Iowa, resemble tight clusters of windowless concrete office towers, but this day the cement sky had robbed them of contrast, rendering the great cylinders nearly invisible. What stood out as my car rumbled across the railroad tracks and passed the green and white “Iowa Farmers Cooperative” sign was a bright yellow pyramid the size of a circus tent pitched near the base of the elevator: an immense pile of corn left out in the rain.
The previous year’s had been a bumper crop in this part of the Midwest; the pile represented what was left of the millions of bushels of corn that had overflowed the elevators last October. Even now, seven months later, there was still a surfeit of corn, and I watched a machine that looked like a portable escalator pour several tons of it over the lip of a railroad car. As I circumnavigated the great pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss