Omnivore - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 provides an account of how corn has taken over industrial agriculture and farms. Agriculture has expanded from 1 in 4 Americans living on a farm to 1 farmer feeding 129 people, making them the most productive people on the planet and yet barely earning a living. There was an especially troubling account of modern corn cultivation. Pollan does a good job of conveying the soulless corporate culture in the selling of GMO seeds to farmers and how strains have been developed to grow increasingly more dense, creating cities of corn that have taken over farms filled with a diversity of animals, feedcrops and even people. The development of corn monoculture farms has streamlined and minimized human labor to the point were farming communities have become unpopulated ghost towns (Pollan points out that four high schools were required to form one football team).

The advent of monoculture has its roots before World War II. The Haber process is a means of fixing nitrogen gas in the forms usable of life forms. While it was originally used to produce ammonium nitrate in the war, the plants were used to produce synthetic fertilizers to continue the wartime economy. This is a classic example of the logic of industry overcoming the logic of nature. No longer did farmers rely on and energy of the sun and legumes (with nitrogen-fixing bacteria) to restore soil fertility, instead synthetic nitrates (ultimately driven by fossil fuels) were used. While much faster and more prolific, it operates in an energy-deficit, unlike agriculture driven by the sun.

The biological subsidy of synthetic nitrates was compounded by irrational economic subsidies of the Nixon administration that systematically deconstructed the New Deal. Too much yield driving down prices is just as bad as low yield due to weather for farmers. The Even-Granary Program prevented farmers from selling corn into a weak market (to prevent further price drops) by allowing farmers to take out loans and use the corn as collateral (either they can sell the corn to pay off the loan when prices rise again or the government can take the corn). Amid high food prices, the Nixon administration instead implemented a direct payment system encouraging farmers to flood the market (because the government would simply pay the difference when prices fell). This removed the bottom from corn prices, forcing farmers to keeping increasing yield to earn enough money to survive (a farm is not like a corporation, employees can't be fired to downsize if the market is weak; if the farmer leaves another farmer will take the land and continue to saturate the market). In effect, the government was pandering to corn purchasers, filling supermarkets with cheap food made from corn derivatives.