Grow Less Corn, Eat Less Beef

There aren't a lot of people in the modern world, let alone America, who think we should grow less food. Population continues to grow at an exponential rate, as Malthus predicted so long ago, we'll need to find ways to increase yields to feed all those babies. Bigger mechanized farms utilizing the latest designer seeds, pesticides and fertilizer are clearly needed to protect our children and all those Chinese and poor African babies, and what about all those Russian orphans. So many babies to feed. Indeed. So we should grow less corn (and fewer babies, too).
What's this, you say? Grow less corn? But the babies! The farmers! You are an unpatriotic baby hating communist!

While all that may be true, growing more corn is keeping people (un-American people) poor, stressing the environment and wasting lots of land to feed cows, pigs, make sweeteners and ethanol. Though that corn is used in lots of products and fed to lots of animals, none of it is used to feed people. In 2005, Iowa alone produced almost 12 million acres of corn producing 2.2 billion bushels of corn.1 That's a whole lot of corn being used for something other than direct human consumption. All that corn is, of course, rotated with beans so as to not deplete the soil, but is also grown using lots of chemicals that end up in the rivers and streams and most of which end up in the Gulf of Mexico and which has produced a "dead zone" the size of New Jersey in which no life, plant, animal or otherwise, can grow.2

Most of that meat you eat is made out of oil. Oil isn't fed to cows, of course, but all the indirect oil usage whether in growing the feed corn or transporting the meat means lots of petroleum is being used for your Big Mac.3 And as our desire for meat and ethanol and other corn based products increases, more people are looking to make a profit off of it. This causes a couple problems: 1. land that is currently under dense rain forest is being burned because of pressure from agriculture and livestock in the Amazon, and 2. the U.S. government is still paying subsidies to American farmers to encourage them to continue growing corn. Of course subsidies allow them to pay their bills and feed their families even when the price of corn is very low. But all these American farmers receiving subsidies are in direct competition with small farmers in other parts of the world (who probably should depend on an export cash crop, but that is a different issue) and the market is saturated with corn and the price is kept down.4 Good for consumers (cows and pigs and their owners, ethanol producers) but bad for unsubsidized producers (poor farmers in the third world).

If we stop subsidizing corn growers in the U.S., if we reduce our demand for corn based products produced with massive amounts of chemicals, we will start to solve some serious issues. Not least of which is the pollution of our creeks, streams, rivers, lakes and even oceans with runoff. We will use that land to diversify our food production so that it is less dependent on oil, and finally the reduced demand will make it less desirable for poor farmers to grow the crop in ecologically fragile areas.

How?

Eat less meat. Or stop eating it all together.5