Iowa has the first primary every year in the US[1]. Iowa produces more corn than any state[2] while being 32nd in population. Corn is very important to people in Iowa and as long as the first two facts remain the same, corn will continue to be highly subsidized and supported in other ways by the US government. [1] https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2] https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-…
So, rather than a banana republic, it's a corn state?
"There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business." Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it. "It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years." Any data to back this up? Th…
> incompetence It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other. > Any data to back this up. The freezing thing was actually from…
That's because it makes no sense. The US consumes around 12 billion bushels of corn per year. Yes, some of that may be wasteful (corn syrup etc). But trying to store 24 billion bushels of corn without loss is simply impossible. Each bushel is roughly 1.25 cubic feet, so 2 years would be 30B cf. Imagine a storage unit 2 miles long, 2 miles wide, and 300 feet tall.
Precisely my point. Maybe that's not a very future proof plan for Iowa? That sounds like at some point they are going to have to cut loose from the federal handouts.
It is apparently easier to make the subsidies continue forever than to consider growing alternatives.
Yep. When it comes to specialization farmers are not excluded. All crops, if their production can be mechanized, need specialized tools to farm at scale. In Iowa at least this looks like combines that are tooled for corn and soybean to allow for cycling the fields every few years.
Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into. Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money. I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary…
> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
The people who want to open a dairy farm that's kind to the cows comes to mind. Then they realize that cows need to be milked 2x a day, every day, forever.
> Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.
Fewer people is the answer. Is there a way to humanely, ethically, and justly limit the population? Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether. Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep…
Trying to limit the world's population is impossible. It would require an authoritarian world government and that's not going to happen.
Some counterpoints: - Ethanol effectively helps spread carbon emissions across a larger area. It significantly cleans the air around large cities, I guess at the expense of more emissions in rural areas? But then again I'd guess most of those rural areas are not super concerned about carbon emissions and are very supportive of corn subsidies. - Of the three goals of adding ethanol to gasoline, it seems like 2 of 3 of…
How does ethanol clean the air around large cities? It's still a hydrocarbon fuel and still requires a catalytic converter to lower the production of harmful byproducts from burning it inside of a cars cylinder.
It's a substitute for lead in gasoline. There might be other reasons too.
Iowa has the first primary every year in the US[1]. Iowa produces more corn than any state[2] while being 32nd in population. Corn is very important to people in Iowa and as long as the first two facts remain the same, corn will continue to be highly subsidized and supported in other ways by the US government. [1] https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2] https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-…
It would be good for Americans to understand how their layered elections work out into something quite undemocratic. Designed to be so [1] in fact. Things don't need to be this way, and to set the country up for bad incentives this way, but it requires understanding who exactly is fighting and benefiting from the current set up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) Yes, it's a book. Highly worth the ti…
There are a lot of elected positions in the US that actually undermine democracy by themselves being democratically elected, such as sheriff, judge, and indeed election commissioner. These are jobs where the correct thing to do is often at odds with the popular thing to do, and favouring the latter over the former is potentially disastrous.
Precisely my point. Maybe that's not a very future proof plan for Iowa? That sounds like at some point they are going to have to cut loose from the federal handouts.
It is apparently easier to make the subsidies continue forever than to consider growing alternatives.
I agree. I can't speak to how this was marketed/pitched at a national level, but in my (midwestern) state it was a huge deal so even as a kid I paid attention to it. I don't remember much of a climate pitch at all. Everyone immediately pointed out that it cost more energy than it produced. The pitch to the public where I lived at the time was national security (energy independence), and of course the demand it would…
> it cost more energy than it produced How can that be? Are you including the solar energy? Well, in that case, every process out there has a less than 100% efficiency, so the claim may be true, but also vacuous. If you don't include the solar energy, then are you saying that all the energy used to make the fertilizers, to plow the fields, then harvest them, then brew the corn and distill it, is less than the energy…