Farmer
George Naylor sounds a little too much like the fictional character
Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when I ask about his corn crop. June is
usually a wet month, but not this year. One time it “rained” so little
it just barely wet the bottom of his rain gauge. Add that to several
days of triple-digit temperatures that accelerated evapotranspiration
(water loss from his soil and his crop) and his corn is in a sad state.
But he’s actually relatively lucky because he is in Iowa, which got some
rain early in the season. Farmers in Illinois and Indiana are faring
much worse.
The 2012 drought is now the
worst drought
our country has faced in half a century. As of the end of June, a third
of the nation was in severe to extreme drought, and more than half
faced moderate to extreme drought. All in all, June ranks as the 14
th warmest and 10
th driest June on record. By the end of July,
the USDA had declared
1,584 counties in 32 states as primary disaster areas, making farmers
and ranchers in those counties eligible for federal relief programs.
Analogies to the Dust Bowl are becoming common.
Most of the time,
Americans don’t need to worry much about how the food gets to our table
and whether the weather has anything to do with it. It gets hot, and we
put on the air conditioning. It doesn’t rain for weeks on end, and we
celebrate the sunshine. But now, the fate of the corn crop on Midwestern
farms even has
comedian Stephen Colbert worried.
Agricultural economist Bruce Babcock appeared on his show, warning him
that the prices of meat, dairy and eggs will increase because “American
livestock are fed a corn-heavy diet.” As Colbert put it, “It is one
thing for global warming to make sea levels rise, but nobody told me it
would make my cheese levels recede.”
Now is perhaps a good time to
reflect on the extent to which the entire American food system is built
on one crop – corn. And within that one crop, we rely on a very narrow
range of genetics; although there are more than 250 known genetic races
of corn,
the U.S. almost exclusively relies on just two of them.
Because the U.S. is the world’s number-one producer, consumer and
exporter of corn, global food prices are also linked to America’s
ability to grow corn. This year, we are going to find out what happens
when the crop fails in many parts of the country. Now is a good time to
ask ourselves: is it smart to bet the global food supply on a few
varieties of one crop grown in one country?
Within the U.S., every
state except for one (Alaska) grows corn, but the corn is concentrated
geographically in the Midwest. Two states, Iowa and Illinois, grow more
than 30 percent of America’s corn (measured by acreage). Add in three
more states (Nebraska, Minnesota, and Indiana) and you’ve got nearly 60
percent of U.S. corn. Another six states (South Dakota, Kansas, Ohio,
Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan) can also be considered major
producers. These 11 states grow more than 80 percent of U.S. corn,
mostly without irrigation, and right now half of them are severely
suffering from the epic drought.
Where does all the corn go? Well,
we aren’t eating it on the cob. Most of the crop is split between
livestock feed and ethanol production with a smaller percentage going to
exports and smaller amounts still going to produce foods we actually
eat directly like high-fructose corn syrup. Over the past decade, we’ve
seen a dramatic increase in the percent of the crop that goes to produce
ethanol.
Experts debate how much biofuels impact food prices, but
a few trends are clear. As we’ve devoted more and more of our corn crop
to ethanol,
corn prices have gone up.
Once upon a time, prices hovered around $2.50 per bushel. Now they are
well above $7 per bushel. Jeffrey O’Hara, an agricultural economist for
the Union of Concerned Scientists, recalls when organic corn sold for $4
per bushel just a few years ago. Now it is going for $16 per bushel.
“People are going to start wondering why they don't see organic milk at
the grocery store,” he says.
With corn prices so high, farmers
have devoted more and more acreage to growing corn. Perhaps when prices
were lower, a farmer might have rotated between corn and soybeans, but
now he might choose to grow corn every year. Maybe in the past she would
have enrolled some of her more marginal land in a conservation program,
earning money to keep the land in prairie instead of growing corn
there, but now it is more profitable to grow corn on that land. As a
result, U.S. farmers are growing more acres of corn than any other year
since the bad old days of the Dust Bowl.
But U.S. corn production has not only increased because of increased acreage. Since 1960, the U.S. has
increased average corn yields
from around 60 bushels per acre to over 160 bushels per acre. Yields of
over 200 bushels per acre are not unheard of. But this has come at the
cost of genetic diversity. By selecting corn seed for yield and yield
alone, the U.S. has sacrificed other valuable traits – like, perhaps,
drought tolerance.
In recent years, the already narrow range of
corn genes has been impacted by a lack of competition in the seed
market. Together, Monsanto and Pioneer control about
70 percent
of the corn seed market. Pioneer, now owned by DuPont, has been a giant
in the market for decades as it was the first company to commercialize
hybrid corn nearly a century ago, but Monsanto is a relative newcomer.
As
it jumped into the corn seed market, Monsanto bought up major corn seed
companies like Holden’s and DeKalb. The acquisition of Holden’s was
especially significant as Holden’s produced inbred lines of corn seed
and sold them to independent seed companies around the U.S. The
independent seed companies then used those inbred lines to produce and
sell their own hybrids. Monsanto now not only controls a huge share of
the market, it also has the means to deprive independent seed companies
of the germplasm they once relied on.
Globally, the U.S. produces
more than 40 percent of the world’s corn. Next in line is China, which
produces less than half as much corn as the U.S., but we are the world’s
largest exporter whereas China is the world’s largest importer. We
export more than five times as much corn as the world’s second largest
exporter, Argentina. When the U.S. corn crop suffers, the global corn
supply suffers – and prices go up around the world.
The full
picture of U.S. farming includes more than just corn, of course. But not
much more. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. cropland is comprised of just four
crops. This year,
the USDA estimates
that the nearly 30 percent of U.S. cropland is planted in corn, 23
percent in soybeans, 18 percent in hay, and 17 percent in wheat. Of
these, only wheat is significantly different from the others: it mostly
goes to feed humans (not livestock), it is
less affected by the drought in the U.S., and the U.S. is not the world’s top producer (it’s fourth).
All
in all, the U.S. has produced an extremely efficient – but fragile –
agricultural system. When all goes well, the U.S. produces massive
amounts of incredibly cheap calories. But when something goes wrong, the
system can come crashing down like a house of cards.
Strangely
enough, the group that won’t be suffering the most this year are the
very farmers whose crops are lost to the drought. The vast majority has
federally subsidized crop insurance, which will pay them back for about
75 to 80 percent of their losses, depending on the amount of coverage
they’ve elected to take. Crop insurance is a relatively new phenomenon,
and it’s one that
agricultural economist Daryll Ray argues
allows farmers to grow corn in riskier areas where – without insurance –
they would have elected to plant crops or pastures more appropriate for
the area.
Those who will suffer are livestock producers. For any
U.S. livestock operation, the choices this year are not good ones. Your
animals can eat corn, soybeans or hay, and all are impacted by the
drought. Farmers who have entirely given up on producing grain or beans
from corn and soybeans are harvesting their entire plants to feed to
their livestock as
silage or
hay, respectively. The
USDA is also allowing farmers
to harvest hay or graze their animals in 3.8 million acres that had
been set aside for conservation, including some wetlands. Another option
is culling your herd, slaughtering your animals and selling them for
meat to avoid the need to feed them later. Some predict that this will
occur, initially driving meat prices down before they go up later.
Naylor,
who is not only a farmer but also past president of the National Family
Farm Coalition, feels that farmers will not be able to reduce their
herd sizes as much as they could have in the past. “It used to be when
farmers were raising livestock, they were a lot more flexible about
whether they decided to raise livestock this year or next year. They
were using relatively inexpensive facilities,” he recalls. As he sees
it, a shortage of feed grains and high prices might have resulted in a
drop in demand in the past as farmers reduced their herd sizes.
Nowadays,
expensive confinement facilities are used in the majority of livestock
operations. Naylor believes they “have a huge investment in the facility
itself and if they're not running livestock through there, somebody's
going to be paying for that facility regardless… they are going to try
to keep those things full to minimize their losses.” Many such farmers
contract with large meatpackers like Tyson or Cargill, and the packers’
interest is in keeping their slaughterhouses running at capacity. Naylor
also suspects the packing companies “want to keep up a certain volume
and not upset people's typical diets – they want to keep their customers
on board as long as they can.” In other words, they don’t want Stephen
Colbert’s cheese levels to recede.
Americans certainly will not
enjoy paying higher prices for eggs, dairy and meat, nor will they
relish reducing consumption of expensive animal products. (That said, it
might be a blessing for our health if Americans substituted lower
priced but healthier plant-based whole foods in their place.) But if
recent history is an indicator, the people who will truly suffer don’t
even live in the U.S. Prices spiked a few years ago, in 2008, and
Americans took it on the chin. Other countries
experienced food riots.
So
what can we do to prevent such disasters in the future? Diversify, says
O’Hara. The scale of this particular drought is so enormous that we
would have suffered consequences no matter what, but we might have
reduced them by diversifying the crops we grow, diversifying where we
grow them, and diversifying the varieties of each crop grown.
Michael
Pollan, who agrees about the importance of diversification, says, “It's
also worth pointing out that organic soils perform much better in
drought than conventional, because of the superior water retention of
organic matter.” In fact, the Rodale Institute, in its 30-plus-year long
Farm Systems Trial,
found that organic corn and soy yields match conventional yields in
most years but exceed them in drought years. In addition to building up
the soil with manure or compost, their methods also improve water
retention by utilizing a thick layer of mulch on top of the soil. They
also found that organic methods use less energy and sequester more
carbon in the soil, helping to mitigate the climate crisis in the long
term. But a minute percent of U.S. corn is grown organically, and some
organic farmers use excessive tillage to control weeds, thus negating
many of the benefits organic methods should offer in a drought.
When asked,
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack dodged a question
about whether the drought was related to the climate crisis and instead
used it as an occasion to promote drought tolerant seeds. But Union of
Concerned Scientists
found
that Monsanto’s new genetically engineered “drought tolerant” corn
provides minimal benefits in the face of drought. So maybe we should
take a serious look at diversifying our food system and reducing carbon
emissions instead of counting on drought tolerant seeds to bail us out
after we break the climate.
