So What's So Bad About Corn?
As Iowa Enjoys a Bumper Crop, Farmers Hear It From Environmentalists, Ethanol Skeptics and Other Critics
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post
NEVADA, Iowa -- To say that corn is king around here is to come close to demoting it. In the last couple of weeks, the farmers of this state finished harvesting an astonishing 14 million acres of corn, which is more than a third of Iowa's surface. The yield: nearly 2 1/2 billion bushels. That's about 420 billion ears of corn, or about 225 trillion kernels.
A phone call to Tim Recker, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, found him in his combine, harvesting the last of a bumper crop.
"I got 225-bushel corn that I'm doing right now, which is phenomenal," Recker said by cellphone from a field near the town of Arlington. That's 225 bushels per acre. For a corn farmer, that's living in the tall cotton.
And yet, despite the fabulous harvest and the boom in ethanol made from corn, corn farmers often sound beleaguered and aggrieved. Corn, they say, has been getting a bad rap.
"You have to wear a flak jacket," said Bill Couser, who farms 5,000 acres here in the central Iowa town of Nevada (pronounced ne-VAY-da). "When we planted this crop, people said we were the villains of the world."
This mundane plant, once arguably dull as dirt, its name useful as an adjective ("corny") to describe something kind of lame and hillbillyish, has become improbably controversial. The gist of the criticism: So much corn, doing so many things, serving as both food and fuel, and backed by billions of dollars in government subsidies, has been bad for America and the rest of the world.
(Continued here.)
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post
NEVADA, Iowa -- To say that corn is king around here is to come close to demoting it. In the last couple of weeks, the farmers of this state finished harvesting an astonishing 14 million acres of corn, which is more than a third of Iowa's surface. The yield: nearly 2 1/2 billion bushels. That's about 420 billion ears of corn, or about 225 trillion kernels.
A phone call to Tim Recker, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, found him in his combine, harvesting the last of a bumper crop.
"I got 225-bushel corn that I'm doing right now, which is phenomenal," Recker said by cellphone from a field near the town of Arlington. That's 225 bushels per acre. For a corn farmer, that's living in the tall cotton.
And yet, despite the fabulous harvest and the boom in ethanol made from corn, corn farmers often sound beleaguered and aggrieved. Corn, they say, has been getting a bad rap.
"You have to wear a flak jacket," said Bill Couser, who farms 5,000 acres here in the central Iowa town of Nevada (pronounced ne-VAY-da). "When we planted this crop, people said we were the villains of the world."
This mundane plant, once arguably dull as dirt, its name useful as an adjective ("corny") to describe something kind of lame and hillbillyish, has become improbably controversial. The gist of the criticism: So much corn, doing so many things, serving as both food and fuel, and backed by billions of dollars in government subsidies, has been bad for America and the rest of the world.
(Continued here.)
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