King Corn

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Anyone watch this documentary on PBS last night?  It was pretty good, although I had to stay up past my bedtime to watch it.  Kind of nice when people take the time to make something informative that is also entertaining, kind of like "Supersize Me".  The basic premise was two college graduates decided to grow an acre of corn in Iowa after graduation and follow it into the food chain.  Watching the process to make high fructose corn syrup was pretty disgusting!  Bleh!  No wonder it's not good for you!  They talked to Earl Butz, who was the secretary of agriculture in the 70s who changed our farm policy to more production rather than meeting the need of the market, and it was kind of sad that he didn't see the problem with the massive mono-culture farming going on as a result... he just saw that we have more food available than ever before.  They were completely respectful toward him as well as to the big farmers, and in the process, most of the farmers/ feed lot owners etc, admitted that what they are producing is not really food.  One of the farmers said, "We're not raising corn, we're raising crap!"  Another guy, I think a professor of ag somewhere, said something along the lines of "5 tons of food per acre and not a bite of it edible."  I can remember when I was a kid, my grandpa talked about how that the government used to pay them to keep some of their land out of production, but now since everything was geared toward production, it really put a squeeze on him.  At least I had the advantage of knowing what grass fed beef tastes like, as we didn't use corn rations at all.  One of the things mentioned in the film was that most people born in the last 30 years have never tasted grass fed beef.  Anyway, it was worth the watch if you see it on their schedule... the name was King Corn.

[ScottA]

The systematic destruction of family farming by the US government is one of the greatest crimes of the last century and no one even noticed except maybe for John Mellencamp who wrote some songs about it.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I can remember as a kid watching all the small family farms around us slowly quit producing anything commercially.  We still sold fruit (peaches, apples, grapes and watermelons, mainly) but we didn't sell beef commercially, or anything from the garden, really.  I remember Grandpa fussing about the farm program and how that they were wearing all the land out and making it good for nothing by pushing production above all else and ceasing to give subsidies for leaving land fallow.  At the time, though, it didn't make sense to me to be paid by the government to farm or not to farm a piece of land.  What DID make sense to me was to be paid by the consumers for our produce.