For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90m acres – about the size of Montana – and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.
But a growing body of research reveals that the US’s obsession with corn has a steep price: the fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.
Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.
Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when the nitrogen in the fertilizer breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.
The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol – which now consumes 40% of the US corn crop – is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.
Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn”, demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions.
One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land.
“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can’t solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”
Yes. Crops should be rotated.
I recently read a really good article explaining how massive conglomerates have ruined farming in America and how FDR’s crop rotation policy was right. Thought I had bookmarked It, but now I can’t find the article.