Fixing the Hole in the Breadbasket
We pay farmers to lose money, pollute, & plow down habitat. There's a better way.
by Richard Conniff
This is a story that’s stuck in my mind for the past few years. I dropped it when the otherwise intelligent editor to whom I had proposed the idea stunned me by saying it wasn’t a story. To my mind, it’s a revolutionary approach to changing farm practice and policy in ways that would make life better for farmers, wildlife, and the environment. You be the judge.
We still call it America’s “breadbasket.” But circumstances—and politics—have made that nickname a joke. Hardly any of this year’s corn harvest in the massive swath of farmland from the Upper Midwest into the Great Plains will end up in recognizable form on people’s dinner plates.
Instead, close to half will get turned into ostensibly “green” ethanol fuel for cars. (Research suggests it’s actually no better than gasoline in climate terms, and likely up to 24 percent worse. But that’s not today’s story.) Another 40 percent will feed livestock. (Also a big topic for some other time.) What’s left will mostly get processed into high fructose corn syrup and other sugars. For this dubious harvest, farmers have increased corn acreage by more than 50 percent over the past 40 years, to almost 100 million acres this year. We have paid for it of course, with federal ethanol subsidies and crop insurance price guarantees.
Farm families have paid, too, in sickness and in lives lost. A 2019 study estimated that U.S. corn production is associated with 4500 premature deaths a year from air pollution, mostly from overuse of nitrogen fertilizers. The same fertilizer causes widespread water pollution, from the farm, where people have to drink the water, all the way downstream to the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
The irony—well, there are a lot of ironies here, but let’s take them in order … The first irony is that more than a quarter of the acreage planted in corn is always going to lose money, and it’s possible to identify exactly which acres well before the seeds go into the ground. It’s not a trivial loss either but as much as $350 an acre, and $200 on average, according to Bruno Basso, a Michigan State University professor specializing in sustainable agriculture.
Farmers may recognize these money-losing acres in a vague way, based on what they can see with their own eyes. The land may be too wet, too dry, too shady, too close to an edge, or otherwise marginal for farming. The precision agriculture technology in their tractors may also tell them where the yield is low, sometimes in painful detail. But especially on a large farm with hundreds of fields, it takes work and an element of technological skill to recognize which acres lose money year-after-year. And the price guarantees from federal crop insurance mean there’s no incentive to even bother looking. The system will reward farmers for planting wall-to-wall corn in any case.
The second irony (and it’s a big one): On top of the financial loss, says Basso, those same acres—just a quarter of breadbasket farm land—produce almost 80 percent of the pollution. That’s because plants that are thriving tend to make good use of the fertilizer that’s being applied. Those that are struggling don’t, and the excess fertilizer gets blown into the air or washed off the soil into nearby streams and rivers. The easiest fix for the pollution should be to stop planting corn on those polluting acres.
Final irony: The same acres that no one should plant in the first place tend to be the ones which would otherwise provide natural habitat for birds, insects, and other wildlife. That’s a big deal. A Cornell University study just published in the journal Conservation Biology points out that 76 percent of the original forests and prairie grasslands in the region have vanished since 1850 and been converted instead to cornfields. When migrating birds cross the region now, they fly at high altitude to pick up strong tailwinds and otherwise adjust their flying behavior much as they do to cross a major obstacle like the Gulf of Mexico. The few surviving patches of forest and prairie serve as essential island rest stops for a vastly reduced bird population.
The rapid expansion of corn farming in the Midwest over the past 40 years is also a major reason monarch butterfly populations have collapsed from 35 million in the 1990s to a few hundred thousand today. (I wrote about this collapse a decade or so back, when the leading villain was Monsanto and its pesticides. Now, by way of big corporate fish getting eaten by bigger ones, it’s Bayer.) Federal listing of monarchs as a threatened species is now under review, but unlikely to result in action under the current presidency.
Basso uses the term “precision conservation” for his proposed alternative to wall-to-wall corn. It uses many of the same tools as “precision agriculture,” including satellite imagery to remotely measures the health and density of crops, yield maps for individual fields from monitors onboard tractors and combines, and technology for adjusting the amount of fertilizer being applied based on field conditions. The difference? Precision conservation uses this technology to avoid pouring more money into unprofitable fields.
Basso spent 15 years figuring out how to put new technologies to work for smarter farming. It took eight years, working with colleagues, to produce the field-by-field analysis of 74 million acres of Midwestern farms, showing that 26 percent of the fields are always money-losing. Another 28 percent toggle back and forth from profit to loss depending on weather. (Recognizing a bad year early on would be a good way to cut back on fertilizer, save money, and reduce pollution in those fields.) Less than half the land planted in corn is routinely profitable.
Basso’s research team is currently in the third year of a five-year U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to demonstrate the effectiveness of smarter methods on a handful of large farms. The project pays farmers not just to stop planting in unprofitable areas, but to convert them back to habitat or “biodiversity areas.” Basso says the method actually improves agricultural productivity in adjacent fields. The effect on bird and insect life in those areas is still under study. Basso’s ambition is to make “precision conservation” methods much more widely available, and ultimately to change federal policy in ways that make smarter farming practical.
Farmers get the idea when Basso shows them field-by-field profitably maps. “Oh my god,” one remarked, at the thought of not having to plant or tend unprofitable fields, “it’s like eating the barbecue and not paying for the bones!”
It remains to be seen if their representatives in Congress, largely fed by Big Ag lobbyists, will pay attention.
I LIKE BUGS
I’m stealing an idea here from Paul Krugman, who likes to end his Substack posts with a musical coda. This song by Jesse Welles celebrates one of the beneficiaries of smarter farming.
Richard Conniff’s latest book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion, is now out in paperback. His other books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (W.W. Norton), Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Henry Holt), and Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time—My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton). He is a National Magazine Award-winning feature writer for Smithsonian, National Geographic, and other publications, and a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
OTHER READING AND VIEWING
Michael Grunwald has a good article on Yale Environment 360 about how Trump’s one big, catastrophic bill, now under consideration in the U.S. Senate, would shred “federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels.”
I
The industrialization of agriculture in America has been a folly, with growth the only measure of success. The use of food to drive vehicles is insanity, driven by chemical companies whose only measure of success is higher profits at the expense of a healthier world. Let’s call this bandwagon its proper name: A Disaster!
Thanks for this, Richard. I'll cite it in my next post from the prairie. I believe it was Michael Pollan who once said something to the effect that we humans are "corn walking." Perhaps it should instead be something like: subsidized, unprofitable corn walking and burning.