by Jay Rayner
I am being driven alongside a field deep in corn country, seventy-five miles south-west of Chicago, where the land lies flat beneath sultry, white, summer skies. It’s taking a while to get from one end of the field to the other. Even at 40 mph the journey is taking some time. I stare out across a carpet of deep green maize, already five feet tall in mid-June, and try to establish exactly where the field ends, but I can’t work it out. My guide, Donna Jaeshke, who farms it with her husband Paul, admits it can be tough to see where one farmer’s field ends and the next begins. ‘There’s precious little livestock out here, so there are no obvious fences,’ she says. Not that it’s an issue with this particular field. It’s all theirs all the way to the treeline, way over there in the distance, shimmering in the haze of the afternoon heat.
This one field covers 230 acres or just over ninety hectares. One hectare is 100 square metres and there are 2.47 acres to the hectare. The average UK farm is around sixty hectares. So this one field alone is 150 per cent bigger than the whole of an average-sized farm in the UK. But it’s only a part of the land that the Jaeshkes work. In total they farm 3,900 acres across a twenty-mile stretch of Illinois. She describes it as a ‘moderately large’ farming venture. She knows people who farm 50,000 acres.
Two-thirds of the Jaeshkes’ land, much of which is leased, is sown with corn, the rest with soya beans. I am right in the heart of America’s genetically modified farming land. Placards for seed producers like Monsanto line the country lanes, a form of advertising to other farmers who can check out how well the crop from that particular supplier is doing. Those placards have led to the legend that most of American farming is corporately owned; in truth 95 per cent is family owned. I know full well that what I am being shown is regarded by many of the food and farming campaigners I talk to as the epitome of a particular kind of corporate evil. It is everything they hate. This is grain farming on a truly industrial scale. I am supposed to hate it too. I am meant to look out at all this and think that something perverse and evil is being perpetrated here against the rich Illinois soil; that in some foul way it is being raped. Instead I’m impressed. Hiding behind those mythologized images of agriculture that consumers love to buy into is this: a vast expanse of territory turned to the imperative of growing food. I am driving through one of the places that literally feeds the world. If the twenty-first century is about the battle to make sure an emerging population of nine billion hungry people has enough to eat – a growing number of whom will, with outrageous cheek, be insisting upon joining the middle classes and consuming in the way that only the middle classes will – then here, not far from the town of Mazon, is one of the places where that fight will be won.
We drive past a soya bean field. I can see dried corn stalks protruding from the ground. ‘It was a corn field last year but now we’ve sown it to soya,’ Donna says. ‘We use no-till technology so you can still see those stalks.’ No-till. I know a little about that: instead of ploughing up the field and grinding the remnants of each crop back into the ground, the surface is left undisturbed and the seeds are simply drilled into the earth. It vastly reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere because the surface is not broken, preventing oxygen from speeding up microbial activity. As a result the organic matter from previous crops is not broken down within the soil. Water runoff and soil erosion are much lower and, more importantly for the farmers’ costs – and for the environment – it requires up to 50 per cent less use of fertilizers.
No-till has its critics. Everything in industrial agriculture has its critics, but genetically modified crops like this enrage more people than most. One of the key arguments here is that heavy industries which are spewing carbon into the atmosphere see this sort of low-carbon farming as a way to offset their own polluting. The farmers can sell a notional credit for the carbon they did not release as a result of no-till to an exchange, where those credits can be purchased by heavy industry. In short, no-till generates its own subsidy in the marketplace, and therefore stands accused of encouraging dirty practices elsewhere. It’s true that most things have unintended consequences, but denigrating a more sustainable form of intensive agriculture because of the way it is used by others seems to me more than a little short-sighted.
Back at the Jaeshke farmhouse, a big, white slat-board affair surrounded by fields of corn, Donna shows me graphs of maize production in the US.
‘The last three years have been so good for us,’ she says, almost breathlessly. Donna is a compact and tidy woman of 60, black hair worn in a bob. She offers me a drink. She offers me cookies and apologizes for the fact that her husband is away in nearby Iowa on business. She mentions the outreach work she does with her church. But she is more eager to talk to me about the gospel of corn, not least because she is on the board of Illinois Corn, a trade body that represents farmers in the state.
I ask her why business has been so good. ‘It’s just been a massive leap in demand. The prices have gone up and so have the yields.’ Between 1990 and 2007 corn yields rose from 120 bushels an acre to over 160. In turn I want to know why that is.
‘It’s the genetics. Every season the genetics seem to be better.’ I had assumed GM strains of maize didn’t change much once they had been developed. Instead they are more like pieces of computer software with new, improved versions being released each season. ‘That’s why we farm so much more corn than soya. It does so much better.’ Donna pulls out her iPad and shows me the day’s bid prices, the amount various grain purchasers are willing to pay per bushel of corn. She has offers from Cargill, ADM and GrainFS, the farmers’ co-op of which they are a member. ‘We sell probably twenty times a year, depending on the price. We have a big storage facility so we can keep the corn until the right time.’
The view from this farmhouse is pretty much as Scott Shellady had described it. If commodity traders have caused prices for corn and soya beans to rise, then that can only be a good thing because it means farmers are doing better. Donna points to a huge, bright-white shed across the gravel yard from where we’re sitting. ‘We built that to house our machinery because we’d had such a good few years.’ She shows me what’s inside: these vast planters and harvesters, polished to gleaming, right down to the last wheel nut. ‘My husband is always credited with how well he looks after his machinery,’ Donna says proudly. A better housing for the machinery means the kit lasts longer. That makes the business more efficient. That means higher profits so they can invest more into their farming activities. That helps them to increase yield. An increase in yield increases earnings. And so it goes on.
From here, at the heart of the US, the grain goes in multiple directions. Nearby in the town of Morris is the Illinois River where Cargill and ADM load barges with grain. From there they connect to the Mississippi and so down to the Gulf of Mexico. ‘It goes to Europe and Brazil.’ There’s also what Donna calls the ‘Inter-modal’ facility at Joliet. ‘The bids there have been better.’ Why so? ‘Because all the grain from there goes to Asia.’
Asia means China.
It is, she says, a relatively new development. Throughout the nineties and into the beginning of the last decade the Chicago area became the recipient of vast amounts of stuff from China, which entered the country at Long Beach in California: all that cheap, aspirational, eager Chinese labour meant they were making huge amounts of the clothes we wear, the electronics we use, the toys our kids play with. Container loads of product rolled into Illinois courtesy of the railroads, for distribution around America. In those boom years the containers they were carried in were considered merely a means to an end. It cost more to get them back to China than they were worth, so they were regularly scrapped.
It didn’t stay that way. Eventually the price of steel increased dramatically with the price of oil and now they had to be returned. But empty steel containers are unstable on ships. They have a habit of rolling off when a swell gets up. So now they packed them with waste materials for ballast. Illinois was sending old newspapers
across the Pacific.
Then the Chinese middle-class boom happened, and the one thing the aspiring Chinese middle classes really wanted was meat, lots of it. In turn what a surge in meat eating demanded was grain for the livestock to eat. No longer were the containers going back stuffed with yesterday’s news. Now they were going to China full of American corn and soya beans. China does one thing really well: making stuff. America does a different thing really well: growing corn and soya beans. So they trade. This is called utilizing comparative advantage.
Let’s stop for a moment and think about this.
IS THAT A PHONE IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST PLEASED TO SEE ME?
You care about where your food comes from. I know you do, or you wouldn’t be reading my lovely book. You think about dinner an awful lot. And lunch. And all the little meals in between. Perhaps you’re the kind of person who, wandering the aisles of the supermarket, stops to study the labels on pre-packed bags of fruit and vegetables. You want to see whether the strawberries have come from Morocco, or the green beans are from Peru. You understand that the best thing is for as much of your food to come from as close to you as possible. Perhaps you even shop in a farmers’ market for precisely that reason. It feels like the right thing to do. It makes sense, if only intuitively. After all, nobody can expect you to be reading all the academic papers on the subject. You are smart enough to see the logic for yourself. Maybe you stop by those stalls overflowing with prime, glossy vegetables so you can phone home to find out what’s already in the fridge.
Stop. Let’s have a look at that phone.
It’s an iPhone, isn’t it? Come on. Don’t be shy. Only cool people read my books. You are reading my book, ergo you are cool, and therefore you have an iPhone.
Or perhaps you’re even cooler than that. Perhaps you have some Android smartphone because you want to thumb your nose at the mighty Apple. So you’ve got that Samsung Galaxy thing because you want to prove you’re not someone who goes with the herd.
Or maybe you’re a sad sack like me and you’re still using a bloody Blackberry, because you’re tied in to a hideous long-term contract which is too expensive to break. You like the proper keyboard with all its buttons and stuff, but hate the fact that the touch pad seizes up or, worse still, the damn thing freezes all the sodding time so you have to open up the back, take out the battery, put it back in again, and reboot it. And every now and then you throw it against the wall to see if it makes any difference. Or stand over the kitchen sink and fantasize about dropping it in there. Or dream about accidentally soaking it in meths and clumsily dropping a lit match on it. You do, don’t you? You do that too.
Sorry, but I really hate my shitty little Blackberry.
Anyway, the point is you have a really complex, cutting-edge phone. And perhaps an iPod and certainly a desktop computer, and maybe an iPad. You have stuff. Do you ever think where it comes from, this pile of stuff? Sure you do. If I asked you, you’d say, oh, China somewhere, probably. If it’s an iPhone you’d be right. It’s probably made by Foxconn in Shenzen or at one of its other factories in China. Or by its outpost in Brazil. If it’s a Samsung it will be made in Seoul and if it’s an HTC it may well come from Shanghai. If you’re one of those people still bothering with a Nokia – how sweet – it might have been made in Hungary, though not if you’ve just bought a new one. They’ve shifted all their production out to Asia like everyone else.
Why is this? You know why. Because labour is cheaper in China and much more flexible than in Europe and the US. The workforce in China is desperate to do these jobs, even allowing for scandals over working conditions at factories making Apple kit. The cost of living is simply lower.
This is what’s called comparative advantage and it directly affects the cost of almost everything you buy.
Have you noticed that there are no local consumer electronics webs, run by earnest chaps with straggly beards called Hugo and Jake who are, ‘you know, just, like, trying to make a difference by cutting down the electronics miles on people’s phones in an attempt to save the planet’? Have you clocked that there is no such thing as an artisan mobile phone? This is because we understand that different parts of the world are better suited to different tasks. You don’t own a local phone because they make them better and cheaper in China, which is a very long way from where you are.
Exactly the same applies to our food. Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana – the entire US corn belt – grows so much of it because it has the right climate and the right soil to do so. Bemoaning industrial-scale agriculture in America on principle is about as sensible as criticizing China for making all those mobile phones. Which you wouldn’t do, because you bloody love your smartphone, don’t you, you dirty little digital warrior?
And that sound is the penny suddenly dropping. Yes, you are absolutely right: this argument is going to kick ten tons of crap out of the local food movement. Have patience. We’ll get there.
As the afternoon draws to a close, I ask Donna if she cares where her corn goes. She says, ‘No. As a farmer I simply want to provide a safe feed and food product.’ On the face of it, that’s a reasonable position. Donna and her family’s job is simply to grow a crop. What happens to it after it leaves the farm is not really their business.
I like Donna. I like her Midwestern openness and straight talking. I admire her commitment to the job at hand. Those 3,900 acres are farmed by fewer than half a dozen people. It’s Donna and her husband and her brother and a guy who comes in during college holidays. But it’s hard to simply swallow her suggestion that farmers have no responsibility for what happens to their food, especially in two areas. The first is the use of all that maize to make high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a cheaper substitute for sucrose, which turns up in mountains of the most processed foods in our supermarkets. It’s controversial. Some researchers have claimed that it suppresses a hormone, leptin, which controls appetite. By switching off that hormone, HFCS makes us constantly hungry and encourages obesity. Other researchers say this isn’t the case.
One thing is certain, however. Americans have a hugely sweet tooth. Perhaps it’s a throwback to the pioneering days when work was hard and all that manual labour demanded as quick a hit of calories as possible. HFCS is big on calories. But certainly the last thing needed by any country that thinks pouring maple syrup onto salty bacon alongside their pancakes at breakfast is a really good idea is a cheaper source of sugar.
But in terms of our global food supply, even the HFCS business isn’t quite as stupid as the faulty science and deformed economics behind the boom in biofuels, which are blamed for the food price spikes in 2008. Not that Donna would agree. Then again, you wouldn’t expect her to. Because 36 per cent of the total US corn harvest (and rising) currently goes to making ethanol. It’s big business.
A SHORT, SPITTLE-FLECKED RANT ABOUT BLOODY BIOFUELS
Edible stuff has been responsible for some really stupid ideas over the years: a major brand’s kidney soup that tasted lightly of wee, fries in chocolate and cinnamon flavours, McDonald’s McAfrika burgers, launched in Scandinavia at the height of an African famine in 2002. But even more stupid than all of these put together is the notion that putting loads of food into big machines to turn it into fuel is a really good idea.
It isn’t.
To be fair it’s not a new one. Back in 1900 Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his new engine by running it on peanut oil. Very quickly, though, it became clear to him that if you were going to build such an engine, petrochemicals might do a rather better job of running it. It might have stayed that way were it not for the drift of history: the various clean-air acts of the seventies, the Arab–Israeli conflicts of the same decade forcing oil prices ever upwards, and, most importantly, the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union had many knock-on effects, not least the rise of militant Islam, which in turn encouraged the US government to think that kicking its addiction to oil from the Middle East might just be the way to go.
Biofuels s
eemed like the perfect solution. When plants grow they eat up carbon dioxide. By processing the sugar elements of plants into fuel you would, in theory, only be releasing back into the air the same carbon that had already been sucked up by them in the first place. It would be what everybody wanted any fuel to be: carbon neutral.
Or not quite. Because that doesn’t take into consideration the petrochemical-based fertilizers required to make your plant fuel grow. Or the carbon used to build and run the tractors, or the harvesters, or the trucks to take the crop to the ethanol plant, or the stuff used to build the big plant in the first place, or to keep on running it, or to take it from the ethanol plant back to the oil refinery so it can be blended with petrol. And that’s before you start factoring in all the water needed to grow the plants, which is hardly an infinite resource.
It should be said that there are endless arguments over this. One influential report, published in Natural Resources Research in 2005, found that it takes between 27 per cent and 118 per cent more energy to produce a gallon of biofuel than the energy it contains. That makes it rather less than the great renewable energy source everybody tried to claim it would be. Another report, by the charity Action Aid, looked at the cultivation for biofuels in Africa of jatropha, also known as the physic nut. It found that the process released a six times greater volume of greenhouse gases than petrochemical usage owing to the deforestation of the land to grow it on. Even the more positive reports – one from the National Academy of Sciences in the US, for example, which did find some positive energy production by using different criteria – accepted that biofuels were not necessarily a great idea because of how much corn, soya beans and other plant material you would need to supply US energy needs. Or, as the Academy’s paper explained, even if the entirety of the US production of corn and soya beans were directed into biofuels it would still only supply 12 per cent of US gasoline needs and 6 per cent of diesel needs. As the report goes on to point out, with delicious understatement, that really wouldn’t be a goer given that people would also need to have something to eat.