Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Published on Saturday, March 1, 2008 by InsideBayArea.com
New Documentary 'King Corn' is a Lot More than Filler Fare
by Angela Woodall
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/01/7402/

OAKLAND, Calif. - Corn isn't just for dinner anymore. In fact, it's for
just about everything but dinner.

That's what Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, former college friends and
co-producers of the documentary "King Corn," discovered when they spent a
year tracing what happened to the corn they planted on their own green acre
in Iowa after it was harvested.

Director Aaron Woolf documented Cheney and Ellis' journey into the dark
heart of modern farming.

Corn - overwhelmingly genetically modified - is in just about every
processed item, from hamburgers to aspirin, from soft drinks to baby
formula.

U.S. consumers take in so much of the grain they are literally full of it,
according to the film, which will be shown at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the
Oakland Museum of California.

Admission is free for the screening and for the panel discussion with
small-farm advocates and environmental experts that will follow. Corn,
according to the documentary, is why our kids are fat and our food is cheap
and our life expectancy getting shorter for the first time in American
history.

But the problem, the film says, isn't with corn itself, although much of
what is grown, including the Cheney and Ellis seed, is so inedible it must
be "processed into food" first.

"We're growing crap - the poorest quality crap the world has ever seen,"
Iowa farmer Don Clikeman says in the film.

The problem is what to do with the massive amounts of excess corn produced
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because of a government-designed and subsidized system.

The answer, according to the film: Put it in everything from vegetable oil,
vegetable broth, cereal, cold cuts, ice cream, ketchup, toothpaste,
disposable diapers and vitamins.

Use of high fructose corn syrup has increased 1,000 percent since 1973,
when U.S. agriculture policy switched from keeping prices steady by
limiting surpluses to intentional hyper over-production, the film says.

Cheap corn also is food for livestock - wreaking havoc on the cows and the
cattle industry - and food for automobiles, in the form of ethanol.
Grain-eating cattle are bad for beef eaters because the diet makes for
unhealthy cows and meat high in saturated fat.

It's "fat disguised as meat," Loren Covdain, a Colorado State University
researcher, says in the film.

It seems that corn is used for nearly anything but corn on the cob.

What a quaint idea - about as quaint as the nostalgic notion of family
farmers tilling their patch of earth. Just 1 percent of the U.S. population
is farm folk compared with 39 percent a century ago, according to figures
the filmmakers cited from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Corn fueled the Aztec Empire, the Mayans ("the corn people") and the Inca.
But modern farmers are like chemists and modern farms have been super-sized
- growing just one or two genetically modified crops that would lose money
without government subsidies, the filmmakers say.

Since the 1900s, the average farm size grew from 146 to 441 acres, while
the number of farms shrunk from 5.7 million to just 2.1 million, according
to the film. Meanwhile, the number of commodities produced on farms went
from five to just one.

In 2007, 92.9 million acres of farmland were devoted to growing corn, the
film says, and just 2 million was planted with vegetables.

Corn pays, partly because taxpayers have provided more than $50 billion in
subsidies to corn farmers over the past decade, according to USDA figures.

And it's likely to continue with the mandate to produce more corn-derived
ethanol, which has boosted food prices, experts say.

Still, Americans will spend less of their incomes on food than will people
of any other nation, the film says.

So, what happened to the duo's corn? You'll have to see the film to find
out.

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