For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90m acres – about the size of Montana – and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.
But a growing body of research reveals that the US’s obsession with corn has a steep price: the fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.
Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.
Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when the nitrogen in the fertilizer breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.
The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol – which now consumes 40% of the US corn crop – is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.
No, we should change crops. Stop subsidizing this shit just to inefficiently turn it into fuel. And so putting it’s syrup in everything.
In an alternative timeline, we continued deploying renewable energy, electric vehicles, and public transportation, curb tailing the need for ethanol, and pushing farms to grow shit we actually eat and bring down the cost of healthy vegetables.
federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify
Those subsidies are backward. Specifically encouraging corn monoculture when there’s already too much corn monoculture makes no sense, and is probably detrimental in various ways: pest control, biodiversity, over reliance on fertilizer…
Probably wouldn’t hurt us to rotate crops or something.
