How Corn Took Over American Farms
May. 14th, 2017 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2qhFuzr:How Corn Took Over American Farms:
meadowslark:
kenyatta:
Corn’s rise has transformed the American landscape. Rice, the only crop that can compete with corn in yields, has held on to its acreage in the regions where weather and soil conditions allow it to be grown, and sorghum has had a mini-revival on the Southern Plains, thanks to buying interest from China. But the U.S. Corn Belt has moved north and west, taking with it soybeans, the crop that tends to fit best in rotation with corn. The expansion has taken land away from wheat, once the top U.S. staple grain, and completely driven oats and barley from some parts of the country.
Farmers in Cass County, North Dakota, where Skunes lives, harvested 291,500 acres of corn last year—a quarter-century ago, they reaped 80,400. Barley, meanwhile, went in the other direction, with 13,700 acres of grain primarily used for beer last year, versus 109,500 acres in 1992.
“If you drive around Arthur now, you’ll see a couple of wheat fields, and the rest is corn and soybeans. Thirty years ago, you would have seen sugar beets, wheat, barley, soybeans, edible beans, a few sunflowers.”
A good short summary of one of my favorite peeves. The only problem is that it is too short. The Bloomberg pitch fails to examine the underlying public policies that created corn’s differential return.
meadowslark:
kenyatta:
Corn’s rise has transformed the American landscape. Rice, the only crop that can compete with corn in yields, has held on to its acreage in the regions where weather and soil conditions allow it to be grown, and sorghum has had a mini-revival on the Southern Plains, thanks to buying interest from China. But the U.S. Corn Belt has moved north and west, taking with it soybeans, the crop that tends to fit best in rotation with corn. The expansion has taken land away from wheat, once the top U.S. staple grain, and completely driven oats and barley from some parts of the country.
Farmers in Cass County, North Dakota, where Skunes lives, harvested 291,500 acres of corn last year—a quarter-century ago, they reaped 80,400. Barley, meanwhile, went in the other direction, with 13,700 acres of grain primarily used for beer last year, versus 109,500 acres in 1992.
“If you drive around Arthur now, you’ll see a couple of wheat fields, and the rest is corn and soybeans. Thirty years ago, you would have seen sugar beets, wheat, barley, soybeans, edible beans, a few sunflowers.”
A good short summary of one of my favorite peeves. The only problem is that it is too short. The Bloomberg pitch fails to examine the underlying public policies that created corn’s differential return.
