The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [32]
The breakthrough came in 1856, when the Chicago Board of Trade instituted a grading system. Now any number 2 corn was guaranteed to be as good as any other number 2 corn. So there was no longer any reason for anyone to care where the corn came from or who grew it, as long as it met the board’s standard. Since this standard was fairly minimal (specifying acceptable levels of insect damage, dirt and extraneous matter, and moisture) growers and breeders were now free to train their energies on producing bigger and bigger harvests. Before the commodity system farmers prided themselves on a panoply of qualities in their crop: big ears, plump kernels, straight rows, various colors; even the height of their corn plants became a point of pride. Now none of these distinctions mattered; “bushels per acre” became the only boast you heard. No one could foresee it at the time, but the Chicago Board of Trade’s decision redirected the evolution of Zea mays. From that moment on the trajectory of the species’ descent was guided by a single quality: yield. Which is to say, by the quality of sheer quantity.
The invention of commodity grain severed any link between the producer of a foodstuff and its ultimate consumer. A commodity is like a filter, stripping qualities and histories from the harvest of a particular farm and farmer. When George Naylor delivers his wagonload to the elevator in Farnhamville, which at the height of the harvest runs twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, his corn is weighed and graded, his account is credited with that day’s posted price per bushel, and Naylor’s worries about his crop—his responsibility for it, indeed his whole relationship to it—are over for another year.
Within hours Naylor’s corn joins the streams of corn coming off his neighbors’ farms; later, that tributary flows from Greene County into the river of commodity corn flowing mostly east and south from Iowa into the tremendous maw of the American food system. (Today much of it flows farther south, into Mexico.) Watching a pile of corn stream over the lip of a hopper car painted with Cargill’s blue-and-yellow logo, a car destined to join a train more than a mile long and holding 440,000 bushels of corn, I began to see what George Naylor was getting at when he’d told me whom it was he grew his corn for: “the military-industrial complex.”
The immense pyramid of corn I stood before in Farnhamville is of course only a tiny part of an infinitely more immense mountain of corn dispersed over thousands of grain elevators across the American Corn Belt every autumn. That mountain is the product of the astounding efficiency of American corn farmers, who—with their technology, machinery, chemicals, hybrid genetics, and sheer skill—can coax five tons of corn from an acre of Iowa soil. All this you can see with your own eyes, hanging around during the harvest. What is much harder to see is that all this corn is also the product of government policies, which have done more than anything else to raise that mountain and shrink the price of each bushel in it.
The Iowa Farmers Cooperative does not write the only check George Naylor will receive for his corn crop this fall. He gets a second check from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—about twenty-eight cents a bushel no matter what the market price of corn is, and considerably more should the price of corn drop below a certain threshold. Let’s say the price of a bushel falls to $1.45, as it most recently did in October 2005. Since the official target price (called the “loan rate”) in Greene County stands at $1.87, the government would then send farmers another $0.42 in “deficiency payments,” for a total of $0.70 for every bushel of corn they can grow. Taken together