by Nick Taranto
As noted earlier, my dad’s family is from Istanbul, and my mom’s family is from South Dakota. In order to more fully wrap my head around how food is grown and produced in modern America, I decided to pay a visit to the ol’ family farm in Dimock, South Dakota, eighty miles west of Sioux Falls, population 125.
My great-great-grandpa and namesake, Nicolaus Goddicksen, emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1878. After spending two unsuccessful years panning for gold in Colorado, some intrepid soul told him about the Homestead Act and the Dakota Territories.
The monumental Homestead Act of 1862 provided the major catalyst for the settling of the American West. The United States government encouraged the country’s westward expansion by turning over vast amounts of unsettled, public land to private citizens. The government granted 160 acres of land to a homesteader at the end of five years if he lived on the land, built a house on it, and farmed it. Not only did many American families move from the East to the Great Plains, but many European immigrants also took advantage of the opportunity to at last own land for themselves.1 Nicolaus made his way for the prairie, chasing the ever-present American dream of land and freedom.
In July of 2016, I took a few days away from the office and kids and made the sojourn from New York to South Dakota. As the plane took off from Newark Liberty International Airport, we banked hard, and I got a clean view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Great-Great-Grandpa Nicolaus would have passed through those hallowed halls 138 years earlier. My commute to the original homestead would take me a connection in Minneapolis and a ninety-minute drive, all in about eight hours of travel time door to door. I wondered how long that same journey took Nicolaus, and what he was thinking as he ventured off to start a new life in hostile country, young, broke, and barely speaking English.
Starting our descent from my layover in Minneapolis as we crossed into South Dakota airspace, green squares stretched to the horizon like a giant’s chessboard. Here and there, I spied a house, a church spire, a silo, a road, but these markers of modern man were drowned in a sea of undulating green leaves.
I got a bit lost on my way to Interstate 90 while driving out of Sioux Falls. Multiple billboards along the side of the road proclaimed, “Global Warming Is A Fact! 13,926 Scientific Papers Support Global Warming! Only 24 Did Not!” and “Evolution Is A Fact! Evolution Proceeded All On Its Own From The Beginning! NO SUPREME BEING REQUIRED!” both prominently authored by SiouxFallsScientists.com. Within a few blocks of the main thoroughfare that cuts through downtown Sioux Falls, the road I was on ran directly into a cornfield, stalks as high as my waist. My mom always rhymed that corn should be “knee high by the Fourth of July,” and apparently, this growing season was not falling short of the old adage.
Instead of taking the Google Maps recommended I-90, I ventured for County Road #42. As buildings gave way to houses and houses succumbed to infinite fields, I set the car on cruise control at seventy-five miles per hour and fell into a trance as the brownish-red-and-black pavement unfurled in front of me like some perpetual tongue.
The amount of corn I drove past on my eighty-mile drive to Dimock was just staggering. As I crested hills, I could see the dense junglelike leaves and the golden trestles of budding cornstalks rolling for miles in all four directions until the horizon. The occasional field of undulating green-and-brown wheat and what seemed to my untrained eye to be plots of soybeans interspersed themselves like small bit players intruding on a monologue. But it was clear that the star here was our good friend teosinte—corn.
“Farming Ain’t What It Used to Be”
My time in South Dakota drove home for me that the way most commodity food is grown, produced, and manufactured in the United States today is bad for the food supply chain, bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for our waistlines. The food production system is not sustainable or designed for health and happiness—and that is true for both farmers and consumers.
Farming has changed about as dramatically as an industry can change since Nicolaus Goddicksen first staked his claim in 1880. While my family has few written records harkening back to the “good ol’ days,” a twentysomething-year-old Norwegian immigrant and pioneer named Ole Edvart Rølvaag homesteaded in South Dakota around the same time and went on to write the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Giants in the Earth. The novel was an immediate success and is praised as one of the most powerful novels that chronicles pioneer life in America. It concentrates primarily on the hardships faced by the pioneer farmers trying to scratch out a life for themselves on the bleak and unforgiving prairie in the late nineteenth century. The book is one epic battle between man and the inhospitable Great Plains. The novel ends with the protagonist freezing to death while taking shelter against a haystack.
One evening, I sat down with my uncle Ron, a big man in his early seventies who has the cracked hands, neck, and eye corners of someone who has spent the vast majority of his life working and living outdoors. My mom’s mom (my grandma) left the farm in the 1940s to go to nursing school, then Switzerland, after my grandpa was transferred there with Cargill, then Minneapolis, where my mom was born. Grandma’s older sister is Ron’s mom, who was born and lived on the farm until she died a few years ago. Ron wears Wrangler jeans, drives a Ford F-150, and has a predilection for fish-themed button-down work shirts and trucker hats emblazoned with the logos of different fertilizer and seed purveyors.
It is temptingly easy to overromanticize a farmer’s life. After a long day in the field and doing chores in the barn, when the sun is setting and the shadows are long, this life seems less stressful and better than what most of us have become accustomed to. But the life of a twenty-first-century family farmer is far from easy.
During my time on the family farm, we talked about the neck-scorching, finger-bending, backbreaking work of tending to dozens of animals multiple times per day seven days per week when it’s seventy below zero in the dead of winter and over one hundred degrees in the shade during the peak of August. A few years ago, Ron forgot to take his truck out of gear and managed to trip and fall and run over both of his own legs, and we talked about the pain he still has and the stress he feels in being unable to take even a few days off work since there’s just no one else who he can rely on. Ron’s wife, Dawn, and I talked about being chased out of a field by a febrile misogynistic bull. We talked about their kids leaving the farm for easier lives and never coming back. We talked about little to no retirement savings and the heartache of selling or renting your land to make ends meet.
At sunset one day, Ron spent an hour driving me around the farm and county roads that comprise the “1,300 or so” acres that he farms. For a person who lives in a two-bedroom apartment spitting distance from Manhattan, the farm felt like a truly massive amount of land, which it is—the farm is nearly twice the size of Central Park. We drove over and paid a visit to Nicolaus Goddicksen in the family cemetery, and as the sun plastered its final rays over the gravestones, we watched the deer hightail it away toward the tree line.
While in traditional real estate you might refer to square feet or maybe acres, in South Dakota farmer speak, you need a larger unit of measurement, and that is the “section.” One section is one square mile, or 640 acres. As I spent time with farmers, they talked about “quarters” meaning a quarter of a section, or 160 acres. At first, I didn’t understand how they could keep track of which acres were where and how much was farmed by whom, but then I realized that the entire state of South Dakota was built to simplify this process. Going from west to east, avenues go from 1st to 487th. And in the other direction, streets go from 1st in the north to 335th Street in the south, where Nebraska, Iowa, and South Dakota collide along the Missouri River.
My relatives farm more than a full section that encompasses fields between 268th and 269th Streets and 399th and 400th Avenues. One morning, I got up with the sunrise and ran the four miles around the section on the dirt roads that frame the perimeter of the corn and soy fields. I was
greeted by a herd of black cattle who stared at me with curiosity and then in one mass turned their hides on me and thundered away to the opposite end of the field.
On the way to the field one day, we turned a corner, and Ron whistled. “Whoa, look at that corn! Put an inch of rain on top of that and it would be the cat’s meow!” He cooed this admiringly, as if he were an adolescent boy marveling at the older girl back from college working as a lifeguard at the local public pool. Corn was inextricably tied to farming, and farming was life. It was beautiful, it was hard, sometimes it sucked, sometimes it was glorious. And the truth was in the details.
Ron had done this job since he was in elementary school. I asked him why, at seventy years old, he was still at it. He took a moment to think, and then he said, “I just love it, you know. I love the sunrise and the sunset. When you’re out here a part of this world every day, it’s magical, you know. I would probably just be doing the same thing with myself if I went and retired.”
I asked Ron what’s the hardest part of farming.
“Oh, it must be the unpredictability,” he responded. “I mean, the good Lord gives and he takes, you know. But you’re at the mercy of the weather. And that can be tough some years. This year is questionable if we’ll make any money. It all depends on yield per acre and price on the board in Chicago. If you don’t own your own land, you’re probably not gonna make any money these days.”
Family farming is at its core a form of family-owned business, where the fundamental asset is the land, the customer is the local grain elevator that pays at Chicago market rates, the merchandise is the seeds produced, and the costs are the inputs to make a harvest. Each of these guys (and all the farmers I met were guys) had to keep a running profit-and-loss statement in his head at all times. Ron walked me through some of his numbers, and that’s when it all clicked for me:
These guys live on a corn leaf’s edge of razor-thin margins. They own their land, but they are indentured to it, the same way an immigrant Dunkin’ Donuts franchisee has the rights to his store but has to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week, just to break even.
If the rain is delayed by three weeks; if storms dropping golf ball–sized hail roll through; if temperatures stay north of ninety for too long; if another part of the Midwest experiences a bumper crop that drives down the price per bushel that is determined in Chicago—any one of these factors could wipe out a year of work and investment.
Coming from my world, where you control for all risks by using data and technology, it was shocking to fully comprehend that something as fickle and uncontrollable as the weather could destroy your entire business model in a matter of minutes.
Federal crop insurance is there to help. For $8 per acre, Ron can insure his crop up to $450 in revenue per acre. But crop insurance has become a very unnatural thing and poses a philosophical quandary for farmers like Uncle Ron, who is socially and fiscally conservative, and for whom the idea of taking government “handouts” is anathema to his way of life. This insurance should cost five times as much or more, but the Farm Service Agency and other federal programs help subsidize the costs and make it possible for farmers like Ron to buy insurance and stay in business.
This struck me as the equivalent of Plated being supported through federally regulated shipping discounts—“Oh, FedEx is too expensive for your current business model? Well, don’t worry about that; let Uncle Sam and the taxpayers help you make your business model profitable.” This seemed totally bizarre to me—farms are not run as private-public partnerships or nonprofit offshoots of the government. If a business doesn’t make a profit on its own merits and needs significant support from the government just to limp along from year to year, can you still even consider it to be a business?
I was driving in a semi down a dusty road to meet Ron at the combine. I asked his nephew Eric, who is just a few years older than I am with two kids, “Do you ever think about not farming?”
“Every day.” He laughed. Then he turned more serious. “Especially recently. It’s just so lopsided, you know.”
I asked what he meant.
“Well, it’s just so damn hard to make any money. Someone else is always making the money, but us farmers? We get nothing. What I told my nephew who is now in the air force is that he should stay in for twenty years, then once he’s got his pension and his insurance taken care of, he should come back and farm and have fun with it. But this ain’t much fun without a cushion to fall back on. Farming ain’t what it used to be.”
I very easily could have been Eric in another iteration of my life. I was one generation removed from the farm, but I lived in a completely different universe.
Subsidies for Corn and Soy Have Dramatically Altered American Food Production
One afternoon, I decided to escape the sun and fields and take a mini–road trip to “town”—also known as Mitchell, South Dakota, population 15,256, home to the World’s Only Corn Palace. The “Palace” is a sports arena and theater whose exterior is entirely wrapped in murals that are made from different parts of the corn plant. The exterior corn murals are replaced and redesigned each year with a new theme—when I visited, the theme was “Rock of Ages” and featured corn kernel thirty-foot-high portraits of Elvis and Willie Nelson. In the late 1800s, a number of cities on the Great Plains constructed “crop palaces” (also known as “grain palaces”) to promote themselves and their products, such as the original Mitchell Corn Palace, which “was built in 1892 to showcase the rich soil of South Dakota and encourage people to settle in the area.”2 By this time, Nicolaus had already been homesteading the farm, growing and selling corn for over a decade.
Corn is to this part of the world what oil is to Texas, what money is to New York, and what technology is to Silicon Valley. It is the lifeblood, and it carries a history and culture that is inseparable from the land and the people. The local middle school and high school sports teams are not the Tigers or the Pirates or the Lions but the Kernels. The local news radio station is 1490 KORN. The lampposts on Main Street are emblazoned with corncobs.
By the time I got back to the farm, a fifteen-mile drive due south from Mitchell, it was time for dinner. It was still ninety degrees outside, and after driving with the windows down across dirt and gravel roads, I was dusty and parched. Dawn met me at the door and said, “You look like you could use a drink!”
She poured me a brimming frozen stein full of what looked like a Michelada. It was cold and crisp and perfect. What do you call this thing?
Ron sauntered in from his office. “Well, I call it tomato beer. It’s just beer and juice from tomatoes that we raised in the garden.” After Ron and Dawn sold off their dairy herd, Ron took up gardening as a hobby, and they now kept a basketball court–sized plot a stone’s throw from their kitchen. That night for dinner, we had mashed red russet garlic potatoes that Ron and I pulled directly from the soil, sweet corn, and a huge slab of rib eye steak that Ron did on the grill.
The steak dissolved like meaty ice cream between saliva-spawning chomps. I asked, mostly jokingly, if Ron had killed the cow himself, and he responded, “Sort of.” The 1,700-pound Angus that furnished our dinner had been raised by Danny, Ron’s brother-in-law. Ron paid Danny $1.70 per pound for four hundred pounds of meat, about a quarter of the animal. Ron was peeved because the price subsequently dropped to below $1.20. An additional dollar of “processing fees” brought the total price per pound to around $3.00.
In my world, processing fees refers to how much our credit card vendors take when we charge a customer for their order. In Ron’s world, it was slaughtering, skinning, cutting, and packaging to go from cow to kitchen. The cow was antibiotic-free, grass fed, grain finished, and processed just a few miles from where we were savoring the beast’s contribution to this world. And that three-dollar one-pound rib eye was probably the best steak I ever had.
But it made me wonder, what does it say about our country and the way we raise our food that a pound of meat of this quality could cost le
ss than a gallon of gas? Is this a hallmark of our food production and distribution system being impressively broken, bountiful, or both?
Farm subsidies have had a profound effect on how American food is grown, produced, and distributed. Traditionally, the American government tended to stay out of the farm business and the business of farmers. It takes a very strong-willed, independent person to be a farmer, and those personality traits tend to mix with federal supervision like oil with water. In the 1930s, despite the fact that food prices were at an all-time low, Americans still couldn’t afford food, and the food surpluses and simultaneous farm crisis persisted to the point that the federal government decided to get involved.
Farm subsidies, quotas, and tariffs have profoundly affected agricultural production and, ultimately, the American diet. Even after the farm crises of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl concluded, many subsidies remained.
Corn, the most prolific crop in America, is one example. Federal subsidies of corn are among the highest of any commodity, amounting to $30 billion between 1996 and 2001. A third of total farm payments made by the government go toward corn.3 These subsidies are used to reduce the cost of production, which result in a flooding of the market with artificially cheap products that are stuffed full of corn.
The unholy alliance between Big Food and lobbyists who aid in the proliferation of corn and soy subsidies is directly responsible for producing the unhealthful foods that define our Flawed American Diet. Over the last fifty years, farm policy has focused on increasing subsidies for commodities, primarily corn and soybeans. This has led to an oversupply that has in turn made it harder and harder for farmers to make a profit, leading to a greater emphasis on maximizing yield and a growing reliance on government subsidy payments. This vicious flywheel hurts the farmer, hurts the planet, and hurts us as consumers.
Simultaneously, smaller farms were purchased by big conglomerate farm holding companies that could more easily operationalize and profit from large-volume commodity sales. Large corporations that purchased the cheap grain profited, and agriculture in the United States became an increasingly industrial sector. As Big Food grew bigger, family-owned businesses found it harder and harder to compete.