Urban WWOOFer: Lost crops everywhere

September 20, 2012

By this time of year, most farmers would have harvested their corn, and the soy would be well on its way to processing. Their fields would already be vast deserts, the bones of the plants remaining to indicate what was.

Instead, field after field sits still covered with corn's tall stalks and soy's leafy sea..but all the yellow and brown of death, unsalvageable and worthless.  The drought across the midwest this year made farmer after farmer lose huge percentages of their crop.  According to a USA Today article, the USDA estimated that US farmers would havest the smallest crop in six years this year (and according to the New York Times, the smallest since 1995).   According to the NY Times, "The drought has affected eighty-eight percent ofthe corn crop, a staple of processed foods and animal feed as well as the nation's leading farm export."  The drought that "settled over more than half of the continental United States in the summer of 2012 is the most widespread in more than half a century."  

The Times article makes note of how widespread the drought's effects are:  

- Land for all major crops is affected
- Seventy-two percent of land for cattle was affected
- Water levels in town resevoirs have dropped and levels have dropped in major rivers like the Mississippi and Ohio
- Shallow waterways are a dilemma for water needs.  Barges are forces to make trips half-full carrying lighter loads, and loss of crop, too, will affect the business of barges, along with that of trucks (and the jobs of those working in barges and trucking)
- There have been record wildfires
- Public infrastructure like highways, power plants, rail lines and runways have taken extra wear and stress for torrid degrees of heat

This is no small phenomena:  fifty-five percent of the continental United States experienced moderate to extreme drought this summer.  

According to one driver with whom I hitched, there is a giant ethanol processing plant in Decatur.  This year, it only received 10% of the corn it had expected from area farmers (this I looked up to verify but found nothing, and there is no reason to assume he should be an expert on the subject).  He found the situation hilarious after working for them and as a laborer all his life.  He had little good to say, and he had no sympathy for a system that uses unhealthy corn to burn and maintain unhealthy animals on giant unhealthy feed lots.

The detached, academic me says, "Perhaps this was mother nature's suble way of nudging to 'diversify'??  If not that, it is certainly incentive to consider ditching the big two (corn and soy).  Rather, turn the ground and don't plant a thing other than perhaps some cover crops.  Let some grasses grow, and buy some cows.  Let them replenish the ground (that you made infertile with chemical farming) for a few years, and in the meanwhile you have the potential of milk, cheeses, auction cows, and meat to sell." 

While that "academic" perspective speaks loudly, I also recognize the pain suffered by the families who work this land and who sowed these seeds (or who sat high up on giant tractors to do so). Their perspective will be far different from mine:  they do what they do for the same reasons I have taken unfullfilling waitressing jobs--to support themselves and their families--and it seems that the average factory farmer in this country today is more of a businessman who retains relatively little knowledge of the natural world, including about the systems that s/he is using, and not holistically knowledgeable about the other options available to her/him.  Humankind tends to habituate to the status quo:  to do what parents, family, and neighbors do, even if it makes little sense to the outside observer (or the academic who is ironically prized for questioning but expected to actually do nothing).