Last month, two friends and I drove to Colorado where we did a four day backpacking trip in the Maroon Bells section of the White River National Forest. Driving through the states in the middle of the country(Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa), I couldn’t help but be amazed/ baffled by the extent to which corn and soybeans were the dominant crops.

Experiencing this sprawling monotonous form of agriculture brought up many interesting questions. I wondered what that land would have looked like five hundred years ago. How would that endless grassy plain have looked undisturbed? What vegetation grew there? What animals lived there? Were the herds of buffalo as magnificent as I have heard them described in books? Has that biome been completely replaced with large scale agriculture or are there still places where it can still be found? Hopefully someone had the foresight to set some aside. What a sight it would have been to see the great plains intact.

I also thought about what becomes of all the corn and soybeans from these farms. How much is actually used for food? Ignoring nutrient needs, I wonder how many people could get all their caloric requirements from the amount of corn and soybeans that are produced in those states? Should corn and soybean derivatives such as corn syrup be considered food or something else? In class, I didn’t really buy into there actually being a distinction between processed and unprocessed food, but over the past few days the idea has grown on me. I have found myself trying to minimize how processed my foods are.

I am familiar with the fact that that corn is feed corn and that it is not the corn that I am used to eating off of the cob, but how different are they actually? What does feed corn taste like? Is it edible? In defense of growing these crops in the middle of nowhere, they would store well and be easily transported, unlike other vegetables and fruits which would require more care. I could see the yields of calories produced per acre being extremely high.

While large scale monoculture may be efficient, I thought about whether it is sustainable in the long term or not. I heard that the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies much of the water for these farms is rapidly drying up. How long will it last? Does the public care? Do the farmers care and are they making any significant changes? Is it an issue of the tragedy of the commons? How inefficient are those big framed metal irrigation machines? Is drip irrigation feasible or it too much of a hassle? How about the effects of the monoculture on the soil? How quickly can a fresh, fertile field be depleted of nutrients in this system? Once the soil is bad, do they just throw tons of fertilizer on it? Are the farmers educated on how much fertilizer to use per acre or do they just assume that more is better regardless of the consequences for the world outside of their farm? Where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico, I know that there are large dead zones. Are these the fault of our modern farmers or is something else to blame? What about their use of pesticides? Do insects eat feed corn and soybeans? How much pesticides do farmers use? What happens to the pesticides once they are applied? Do they stay in the soil? Do they dissolve in rain and runoff into bodies of water?

Who are the farmers that put the pesticides down? Do they own their land or do they just work the land for some large company? Do they make much money? How expensive is the machinery that they use? Are seeds expensive? What’s the deal with farm subsidies? What are the backgrounds of these farmers? Where did they grow up? Were their parents farmers too? Did they grow up in the same area where they now live? If so, from where did their ancestors immigrate? Are they from the east coast of the United States or from Europe? Were their farms once part of Homesteads? What happened to all of the Homesteads? Did they merge and merge until they became the sizes of today’s farms? Are the farmers happy? What do they think of their agriculture? Do they live near communities? Are they lonely?

In many ways, from what I have seen, Nancy farm is very different from these monoculture farms. Other than for the hay, she seems to be much less reliant on machinery, although, she cultivates food crops on a much smaller scale. However, she has much more variety than at the monoculture farms. Each small square had something different. She also was much more self-reliant. The hay feeds the horse which produces manure which is used on the crops. Food scraps are fed to the chickens which produce eggs. This is opposed to a monoculture farm, which would have to import fuel for the machines and, unless the farmers had a garden, food to feed the farmers. In the coming weeks I look forward to seeing more of how the farm is run. It seems like quite an undertaking to manage all of the components.