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Corn in the US is mostly used for harmful purposes. It's used for producing fodder for intensive cattle farming (which of course produces lots of CO2). It's use
by jillesvangurp 5y ago
Corn in the US is mostly used for harmful purposes. It's used for producing fodder for intensive cattle farming (which of course produces lots of CO2). It's used for biofuel production, which as the article observes releases more CO2 than that it saves. And it's used for producing corn syrup which is an ingredient that nobody needs in their diet.
The rest, which would be usage for e.g. corn bread or other staples of North American cuisine, is of course fine. Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. It's a crop that does well under a wide range of circumstances and popular for that reason all over the world. And as a grain, it's an important part of food production.
So, why does this exist? Very simple, federal subsidies to states that have become very dependent on that. Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful.
- demadog 5y agoIt’s a hedge for a nuclear war. If this US is in total isolation, they can grow corn, wheat, soybeans etc quickly with high output. Thinking about the geopolitical strategic layer of ag policy is fascinating!
- stjohnswarts 5y agoA huge and good compromise would be to end the ethanol subsidies and only give it for human and cattle food. Anything else has to get by on what the market will bear.
- njarboe 5y agoIowa has the first primary every year in the US[1]. Iowa produces more corn than any state[2] while being 32nd in population. Corn is very important to people in Iowa and as long as the first two facts remain the same, corn will continue to be highly subsidized and supported in other ways by the US government. [1]https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-schedule/ https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2]https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-production-by-state/ https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-production-by-state/
- jillesvangurp 5y agoPrecisely my point. Maybe that's not a very future proof plan for Iowa? That sounds like at some point they are going to have to cut loose from the federal handouts.
- greenonions 5y agoIt is apparently easier to make the subsidies continue forever than to consider growing alternatives.
- DerArzt 5y agoYep. When it comes to specialization farmers are not excluded. All crops, if their production can be mechanized, need specialized tools to farm at scale. In Iowa at least this looks like combines that are tooled for corn and soybean to allow for cycling the fields every few years. (Not an expert, just a resident)
- gutitout 5y agoThat is the American issue in a nutshell.
- akvadrako 5y agoIowa doesn't have a primary at all, but a caucus. New Hampshire has the first primary. It's a state law.
- dpeck 5y agoOutside of a relatively minuscule number of people who view politics/elections as sport no one cares and they’re treated the same on the national stage.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoSure but most people don't understand how truly awful the caucus system is so it's worth repeating from time to time.
- assttoasstmgr 5y ago> Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful. So once we've put all the farmers out of work and declared success, what do you suggest they do that is "more productive"? Should they lease their corn fields to crypto bros?
- blihp 5y agoOr... and I'm just spitballing here... perhaps switch to more productive crops? I would hope that no one believes we need fewer farmers here in the U.S. (we need more, IMO), but don't incentivize them to produce more of a given type of crop than actually makes sense.
- assttoasstmgr 5y agoIt's not that simple. Farmers typically rotate crops between corn, soybeans, clover, wheat, etc. It helps restore nutrients to the soil. https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/crop-rotation/ https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/crop-rotation/
- watwut 5y agoIt is not like agriculture and farming was impossible without excessive production of corn.
- Retric 5y agoThe extreme investment needed to grow crops at scale has resulted in hyper specialization supplemented by fertilizers etc. I have seen farms near me do Corn, Corn, Corn, Soy, Corn based on whatever they think will be most profitable.
- walnutclosefarm 5y agoIn the last century, kinda sorta. In the major corn producing region of the US (I live in Iowa, the heart of the beast), crop rotation is largely reduced to choosing, based on markets whether to grow corn or soybeans on any particular acre. Dairy farmers still grow some alfalfa here and there, but the black earth midwest is pretty much corn and soybeans, full stop.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoIt's kinda hard to kill those subsidies when farmers have been used to them for 50 years, and it's a big political sticking point. The USDA exists to create more export crops. For the US, this might challenge that. That's also why the FDA can never rule that sugar or HFCS is harmful, it's a major American product, and that would be admitting that it's faulty.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoReminds me of an old despair.com demotivator: https://despair.com/products/tradition?variant=2457305795 https://despair.com/products/tradition?variant=2457305795 "Just because you've always done things this way does not mean it is not incredibly stupid." So, yes change is hard. But we need to change and this is kind of an obvious change to make. If we wait for the FDA to conclude that corn syrup is bad for you, we can indeed wait a long time. So, don't wait for them and adjust their priorities at the federal level. That's what governments are for. You can't expect these agencies to do reasonable things by themselves when they are obviously stuck protecting the very unreasonable status quo. Bloat is the problem both in these agencies and the obese citizens whose interests they are supposed to protect.
- giantg2 5y agoWhat's the point of export crops if we're subsidizing them? We're basically exporting tax dollars.
- goda90 5y agoWhat we need is shifting subsidies. Change the incentives year over year so farmer's can adapt. Maybe add some budget to incentivize faster changing without punishing the slower movers. Throw resources towards training and retooling.
- JetAlone 5y ago
- kortilla 5y ago> Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.
- spiderfarmer 5y agoThe romantic view people have of peasant farms is ruining all discourse about agriculture. I blame the books people read to toddlers. Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.
- imtringued 5y agoWell a lot of conventional farms that are hyperoptimized barely make enough money to get by. It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy.
- lobocinza 5y agoFarming is an efficient market due to the sheer number of competing agents, that drives the price to be close to the cost. Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers. This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
- 5y ago
- raxxorrax 5y agoWouldn't the CO2 from corn be drawn from the atmosphere in the first place? Sure, if you grow corn and let it die, parts of its CO2 content would be bound in the soil. But does that calculation make sense when we look at our fossil fuel consumption? Sure, every bit helps...
- adrianN 5y agoMaking ethanol involves more steps than just letting corn grow on its own, and those steps burn fossil fuels.
- raxxorrax 5y agoSure, in that case it is just as bad. But I don't understand how it could ever be worse than gasoline since part of the CO2 in bio-ethanol should at least come from already unbound CO2.
- eloisius 5y agoBecause the process from growing corn to distilling ethanol requires more energy than it produces. That energy has to come from somewhere, i.e. fossil fuels. It would be cleaner to just burn the fossil fuels than to run the energy through the Rube Goldberg machine of farm subsidies and ethanol.
- walnutclosefarm 5y agoNot literally true from the energetics point of view, but close enough that when you add in the other carbon releasing side effects (degradation of soil carbon, land clearing) that comes with increased corn production, it is a net carbon producer right now. That's what this study is all about.
- speeder 5y agoCorn in particular is inefficient, burning corn produces less energy than the energy required to grow corn. Sugarcane is the opposite, it grows easily (too easy in fact, it has tendency to spread in an unwanted way), doesn't require too much diesel to produce, and it makes a fantastic amount of ethanol when pressed.
- aseerdbnarng 5y agoWhoa there chief. The whole 'that would be a good thing' is an overreach. There are 'better' ways to spend that subsidy but having a steady surplus of food subsidy or not is a way better position for a country to be in than implementing some JIT mechanism with supply/demand set purely by market prices. Just because agriculture makes up a small % of GDP compared to tech we can more easily get rid of Google than we can get rid of grain.
- colordrops 5y agoYou are arguing with a straw man. They said nothing of getting rid of food surplus or grain. They said to reallocate corn subsidies elsewhere. Presumably one destination could be other foods with greater nutritional value.
- aseerdbnarng 5y agofair point. I was focusing on the 'removing subsidies' part and not the 'reallocate' part. Accept the correction
- fredley 5y ago> You are slowly realizing it has literally been years, maybe decades, since you ate any meal made without corn. https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/1074810043495796736 https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/10748100434957967...
- harpersealtako 5y agoIsn't this either obviously false (yes, corn is in lots of processed foods and oils and most animal feed, but people eat things that don't involve veg. oil, meat, and processed foods all the time) or vacuously true (if we're counting the lining of paper bags, then we should also count plastic made from corn-based ethanol, and trucks that use ethanol in their fuel, and drivers who eat meat which is fed with corn, and we breath air with oxygen produced from corn fields, and...)?
- NikolaNovak 5y ago>>Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. Curious, what is the signifier of "organically farmed" here - what benefits does it provide, how does its usage significantly differ of "non-organically farmed" corn?
- giantg2 5y ago"Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful." Like what? The article says that the land would otherwise be conserved, ie not productive. Some of it might even be developed.
- dilap 5y agoPost-NAFTA, artificially low-priced US corn flooded the mexican market and devastated traditional small Mexican growers.
- patch_collector 5y agoA few years back, I caught a ride with a cattle rancher while hitchhiking across South Dakota. We stopped by another rancher's property to give him an estimate of how his cows would sell at market. While we were there, we got to talking about how he'd pulled the cows off of one of his fields, and planted corn instead. Thanks to subsidies, it was more profitable to do that, even though herding cattle is really what he wanted to be doing.
- refurb 5y agoSo your story is farmer stops doing activity A and does activity B because it makes more money?
- alistairSH 5y agoI don't think the OP was faulting the rancher. He's agreeing that federal corn subsidies are warping the market.
- paxys 5y ago> because it makes more money Because it gets taxpayer money for no reason
- pibechorro 5y agoSubcidies are 90% of the reason our country is turning to shit. It leads to corruption, massive distortions and zombie companies that only exist as parasites on tax payers. From the ballooning student debt, to the ridiculous military industry, to prisons being at record numbers, etc. We need a lean and efficient economy which functions "as is", a true and fair free market. Politics should have close to no impact on it and sadly, wirh forced lockdowns which did nothing good (0.2%) and bailouts being handed out like candy, we are very very far from the dynamism which made the country great and free. We need a minimal operating system for the people to run good games over it, we live in Windows Vista.
- JasonFruit 5y agoYou're being downvoted to oblivion but you're speaking my language. Government needs to get out of the way and let people thrive, rather than stepping in to subsidize the ways they're failing and encourage them to continue.
- mastax 5y agoDon't forget high tariffs and the Jones act!
- landemva 5y agoSubsidies are the symptom. The reason is fed govt ability to create unlimited spending. The reason for that is 3rd central bank known as 'Federal Reserve' which manipulates interest rate on govt debt issuance.
- edmundsauto 5y agoHonest question - did farm subsidies precede the FR?
- landemva 5y agoSubsidies in general are enabled by deficit money printing which would presently be unaffordable without interest rate suppression. Farm subsidies take various forms such as tax preferences, import tariffs, and a USDA organization specifically tasked with manipulating crop prices. https://www.usda.gov/ccc https://www.usda.gov/ccc
- foobarian 5y agoI feel like this is where inflation can be pretty helpful. Just like it's near impossible to retire legacy production code, it seems pretty politically difficult to roll back these subsidies. But simply waiting for the inflation to make them irrelevant might be a lot easier.
- smoyer 5y agoEthanol is not a terribly good fuel and causes lots of problems in engines which have seals that weren't designed for it. Engines are also prone to knocking as the energy profile of (enhanced) fuels is different.
- abainbridge 5y agoI thought Ethanol has a very high octane rating (~110-120 RON) and therefore would reduce knocking compared to regular 85-95 RON fuels. I'm sure it has plenty of other problems though.
- vlowther 5y agoEthanol is awesome when it comes to knock resistance because it is much slower burning than gasoline is with all other parameters being equal. Where it bites is that it requires better seals than gasoline, and it has lower energy density, which means you need higher flow fuel pumps, tubing, filters, and injectors to make the same power. Do that, though, and you can run a turbocharged engine at much higher levels of boost and create much more power than you would be able to do with anything short of race gas or even more exotic and dangerous fuels.
- jtbayly 5y agoI can agree with doing away with or changing the subsidies, but the rest of your comment, unilaterally declaring meat to be bad, corn syrup to be universally bad, and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow, is just a bunch of today's talking points.
- cptskippy 5y ago> unilaterally declaring meat to be bad They didn't. > corn syrup to be universally bad The research is still out about whether HFC is processed differently in the body. What isn't really up for debate is the pervasiveness of HFC in everything. Because it's subsidized and so cheap, it excess has made it a cheap raw material that's found in just about everything from Tomato Sauce to Bread. Too much sugar in your diet is bad, and so it isn't much of a stretch to say that having a ridiculously cheap source of sugar that's being added as filler to every imaginable product is probably not great for us. > and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow I think the op was trying to say that corn is a hearty crop that grows fine on it's own without a lot of petrochemical fertilizers. You're jumping to a lot of conclusions.
- jtbayly 5y agoI'll only respond by saying that the kind of assumptions I outlined above are exactly the same kind of assumptions (XX == GOOD, YY == BAD) based on politics with a hint of science, that led to us having corn-based ethanol in the first place.
- gtk40 5y agoThat's helpful. Whenever I hear people rail against corn, I think of all the corn dishes I love as a southerner. Cornbread, grits, corn on the cobb, and at Thanksgiving, corn pudding. My wife has got me to like polenta as well. But those aren't the problems.
- ramesh31 5y ago>Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. For you, maybe. Not for the millions of rural Americans whose livelihood depends on agriculture subsidies. There's a reason why we have the Senate, a place where Nebraska has the same power as California. It's exactly for situations like this. The US is a massive country full of competing interests, and our founders knew that eventually the urban population would massively outnumber the rural population, leading to a tyranny through rule of the majority. So states were put on equal footing in the Senate to give the rural populations a voice. And because of that, the Senate will never ever allow these subsidies to be cut. There's simply too much support for it among the rural states.
- csee 5y agoIndustries and business absolutely have to be allowed to die if they are no longer necessary and desired by the market. If not, you're just kicking the can down the road. Give them a UBI if you are so concerned. Don't prop up zombie industries.
- ramesh31 5y ago>Industries and business absolutely have to be allowed to die if they are no longer necessary and desired by the market. The defense industry would like to have a word with you. There are certain industries that the government props up solely to maintain the capability in times of crisis. I would argue that ensuring an adequate capacity to generate a self sufficient food supply is important enough to meet that bar.
- csee 5y agoDefence is necessary so it isn't a refutation of what I was saying. Also, there is no way the US subsidies of food and billion pounds of cheese in cold storage etc etc have anything to do with a defence justification, it is pure corruption and zombie subsidies top to bottom.
- akomtu 5y agoThat's the Civil War argument: "we know that slavery is wrong, but we can't just end it because livelihood of millions of good upstanding citizens depends on slavery." And just like slavery, the corn syrup industry exists solely because of a law protecting it.
- csee 5y agoAlso sugar tarrifs which makes the susbtitute to HFCS artificially more expensive. It's government distortion top to bottom.
- sidewndr46 5y agoSlowly? It'd probably happen in a single harvest season.