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 Editorials | Issues | September 2007 
The Corn Supremacy
 Hugh Dellios - Chicago Tribune
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| Fermin Ramirez, burns dead foliage to prepare the soil for planting in the Mexican state of Jalisco. (Tribune/Abel Uribe)
For more photos, see ChicagoTribune.com/corn |
For the aging farmer on the hillside, the motions of planting are rote, timeless, almost mechanical, yet as human as the need to lay down roots, to experiment, to multiply. His thick hands never stop moving, even as he segues from grumbling about the government to chuckling at his own saucy jokes to fumbling through the names of his 22 children. Perched on the steep slope of his field, Jesus Garcia grips the sweat-shined shaft of his planting pole, called a barreton, and drives its rusty iron-tipped blade into the dirt. Then he levers the pole away from him, opening a divot in the earth. With two quick sweeps of his hand, he skims two kernels of corn from the tin can tied to his waist and aims them downward in an arc off the back of the blade. From there, they slide neatly and perfectly into the hole.
Garcia, 68, is the last man in the village of San Miguel near Mexico's Pacific Coast to plant corn like this - as the Aztecs did and the Mayans before them and the Olmecs before that - in defiance of the globalized economics and mass-production technologies that are relegating this once-common pastoral scene to the corners of old Diego Rivera murals.
He says his determination is simply to make sure his wife's tortillas have that authentic corn taste. But it also is a testament to humankind's historical, evolving bond with maize and enduring faith in its bounty, a relationship as intertwined as the cornstalks and bean vines that farmers like Garcia have planted since the earliest civilizations of Mesoamerica.
Today's enormous hopes for corn-based ethanol fuel and efforts to genetically engineer corn for surprising new tasks are the latest manifestations of the link to Zea mays, an offshoot of a weed from what is now southern Mexico that developed into corn. It underpins much of the Midwest's rural economy, fattens America's beef cattle, turns up in thousands of unexpected brand-name products on supermarket shelves and serves as a staple food from the Zambian forests to the Tibetan plateau.
A technological light-year from the crop in Garcia's fields, corn has uplifted the fortunes of Steve Ruh and other Illinois farmers, who chased after record corn prices this year with their computerized, 16-row planters. It also fires the imaginations of Kan Wang and other researchers at universities and agri-chemical companies, who are turning corn into ever more sophisticated biofuels to reduce our dependence on imported oil, "slow-breakdown" starches to help diabetics, biodegradable plastics to keep us from burying ourselves in our own garbage, even vaccines that one day may save lives.
Yet however beneficial it may be, corn's engineered evolution, from weed to technological wonder, hasn't come without a price.
For nearly 7,000 years, corn has been considered sacred, although today mostly by peasants who cling tightly to the ancient ways of their ancestors. The Mayans' holy book, the Popol Vuh, tells of how the gods made man from cornmeal. In Aztec legend, Quetzalcoatl gave corn to mankind, while Roman Catholic missionaries later credited the Virgin of Guadalupe for the gift.
Modern farmers also admit to a certain devotion to corn as something more than the commodity they harvest each year. "We pray to the ethanol gods now," jokes Ruh, president of the Illinois Corn Growers Association and a Catholic who farms 2,200 acres in Kane County. "Most farmers are religious; we're always praying for something."
But if corn once was considered a god, some think it has since gone to the devil.
In Mexico, endless trains hauling American corn over the border are seen as a form of Yankee imperialism, stealing away small farmers' livelihoods and emptying rural villages in the guise of free trade.
In a bitter irony, when the price of American corn shot up last year because of ethanol demand, the price of tortillas in Mexico shot up with it, in many cases beyond the reach of the poorest peasants, some of whom had been forced to stop growing their own corn because they couldn't compete with cheap American imports.
Government officials insist that the cheap American feed corn has helped Mexico produce cheaper chickens and pigs, thereby introducing more protein into the average Mexican's diet. But environmentalists and leftist political activists warn that the imported corn's genetically modified genes will contaminate the invaluable storehouse of native species in the birthplace of maize.
Even on this side of the border, farm-policy critics, environmentalists and food experts are raising questions about the agriculture industry's enthusiastic promotion of corn to solve society's challenges.
Excitement about exploiting corn's unique productive capacity to grow pharmaceuticals faded in recent years after several incidents of unintended crop dispersal raised fears about "pharm-corn" genes spreading into the food supply.
Among other concerns are government policies, pushed by farm-state lobbyists, that promote overproduction and provide farmers with billions of dollars in subsidies so that agri-giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland can buy corn cheaply; the environmental costs of using nitrogen fertilizer to increase yields; the questionable efficiency of bulk-feeding corn to cattle, which results in tasty steaks but a considerable waste of food energy - the meat provides less nutrition than the corn it takes to produce it.
"Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated by Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly - has colonized more acres and bodies - than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator," author Michael Pollan writes in his 2006 book, "Omnivore's Dilemma," in which he marveled at the taxpayer money that goes into the corn-farming industry and the environmental issues that result.
"You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as fervently as the Aztecs; like they once did, we make extraordinary sacrifices to it."
At the base of his field in Mexico, Garcia stands silent and perplexed when told of the 21st Century marvels that spring from the same simple grain he harvests. He says his only concerns are that his family is fed and his tortillas pure.
"I've never sold my corn," he says. "I like to eat my corn tortillas, and just the smell tells you they're real. Today, in the tortilla factories, you don't know what they are making them from."
Sugar Grove, Ill.
Beep, beep, beep. The alarm sounds like a reminder to put your seat belt on. Only it isn't that kind of alarm. It's the computer inside Steve Ruh's tractor cab, alerting him that the bin on the 16-row corn planter he is towing has run out of seed for the vacuum tube leading to row No. 10. No planting poles and seed cans in Ruh's cornfields on the western edge of Chicago's sprawl.
The second-generation farmer is hustling in late May to plant his last 55 acres with his $65,000 Case International planter, its computer telling it how quickly to drop the blue- and pink-painted, bug-resistant, herbicide-proof hybrid No. 2 corn seed.
Ruh had set the program to plant 32,000 seeds per acre, and now all he has to do is watch the computer screen track the machine's progress. Each of the 16 row units - sprockets and wheels - opens a furrow, drops two or three seeds about every five inches to precisely 1 1/2 inches below the surface, then closes the hole and packs earth over the top. It can plant 25 acres per hour.
"You tell it what you want to plant and that's what it'll plant," Ruh says, only half exaggerating when he claims the machine rarely has a breakdown he can't fix with a screwdriver.
Across the Midwest, Ruh and his fellow corn growers have planted to the last fence line this year. While the end product of their corn planting labor is normally beef and breakfast cereal, this year they are growing fuel like never before, at one point reaping record prices of nearly $4.50 per bushel, mostly because of the rocketing demand for ethanol.
Ignited by congressional demands for renewable fuel sources and an Iraq-inspired national mandate for energy independence, ethanol plants are popping up all over the Midwest and beyond. As of late July, 123 plants had been built and 76 more were in the works, including the 100-million-gallon Patriot Renewable Fuels facility taking shape off Interstate 80 near Kewanee, Ill., home of the National Cornhuskers Hall of Fame.
To feed the ethanol producers, farmers sowed an estimated 92.9 million acres of corn across the country this year, the most since 1944. Last year, they produced 11.7 billion bushels of corn worth $33.7 billion, a 50 percent hike in value from the previous year. That means $2.7 billion more circulating in Illinois last year, and $2.4 billion more in Iowa.
That means happy days for the Midwest's rural economy, helping raise land values, loosen up bank loans, pay off debts, increase machinery sales, boost business at the hardware store and the local cafe and make farming a little more attractive to sons and daughters who otherwise might be dreaming of big-city life.
"People are going nuts about bio-energy," says Stephen Howell, director of the Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State University in Ames. "We have 25 percent of all the Class A soils in the world," thanks to the glaciers that deposited the soil as they retreated some 10,000 years ago. "We have 30 inches of rain a year. We have the perfect environment for growing corn. The question is how to provide the best return on that enormous resource. Maybe we should be dedicating it to this cause."
It's a dream come true for corn farmers, but also a potential relief for taxpayers, who in bad times have supported American corn farmers with subsidies totaling up to $9 billion a year, by some calculations.
Except it's also a big gamble.
The ethanol frenzy cooled off somewhat earlier this year over fears of an oversupply of corn and an overheated market, then fears of a drought and an undersupply. At the same time, Howell and others worry about overproduction and its nutrient-sapping toll on the sustainability of Midwest farmland.
An even larger uncertainty is whether corn-based ethanol, which enjoys its own federal subsidies, will ultimately be the alternative fuel of choice. Scientists are trying to develop ethanol from cellulose as well as cornstarch, environmentalists note that corn-based ethanol poses its own pollution problems, and food-policy experts warn that diverting too much corn for fuel will ravage the world's food supply.
The fear is that all the ethanol excitement will once again fail to pay off, just as it did in the early 1970s after that era's energy crunch.
"Everyone wants to plant corn, but it needs to come to a stabilized price for people to know where they're at" in terms of how much land they devote to it, says Beau Byington, 32, a broad-backed, baritone-voiced farmer from Kane County. "You don't want to get too crazy one way or another."
Many of the advances in Midwest corn farming are embodied by farmers like Ruh, 37. His father grew corn on part of his land to feed dairy cows; the son dedicates all his rented acres to corn and other crops. Ruh's father got the daily corn price by listening to Orion Samuelson on the radio while in from the fields for lunch; Ruh gets it buzzed to him in a text message on his Nextel in the field three times a day.
"It was up 6 cents a bushel at the open today. At close it may be down 5 cents," Ruh says. "There are so many people making money off this corn it is unbelievable, especially when [the price] swings. You're not going to take good land away from corn," he adds. "We are producing more and more corn every year. We got to figure out something to do with it."
San Miguel, Mexico
Tepiqueno. Alejito. Barqueno. Siquin. Jesus Garcia rattles off the names of the different corn strains growing in his village since he was a boy. Some are stubby, some long. Some white, others yellow. Some fat-kerneled. Some that have come and gone, like the dark breed he remembers his grandfather planting by hand.
"Back then, they only grew black corn. Mas sabroso (tastier)," he says. "That's all been lost."
The evolution of maize, now encompassing hundreds of different strains, began with an ugly, scraggly weed of no particular value called teosinte. No one knows exactly how a paltry plant producing 8 or 10 grains became a thick stalk with cobs that produce hundreds of kernels, but there is little doubt that it comes from some early experimental breeding.
The first evidence of cultivated corn was a collection of specimens discovered in the 1960s by archaeologist Richard MacNeish in an encampment in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico's Puebla state. They were dated at around 7,000 years old.
Somehow, people had discovered how amazingly versatile maize was: its ability to grow almost anywhere and adapt itself to new climates and terrains; its capacity for converting sunlight into fat, starch-filled seeds protected in a husk; the ease with which it could be stored and transported.
Yet corn had one problem: Because its seeds were encased in a husk, they couldn't spread and reproduce without human help. So as we became increasingly reliant on corn as food and feed, maize depended on us to survive as well.
"Corn was invented daily by the campesinos," wrote Mexican historian Arturo Warman in "Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance." "For many, corn is an exception [in the plant world], even a monstrosity. For others, it is the most evolved plant of the vegetable kingdom and occupies an equivalent position to man in the animal kingdom. The comparison is fair because corn is clearly a human creation, a slow and expanding invention of man, much closer to him, in a certain sense, than any other living being."
Reputedly first brought to Europe from the New World by Columbus, it spread to wherever European sailors landed their ships, appearing in Asia, Africa and some Pacific islands by the end of the 16th Century.
Based on records of the period, it arrived in China by 1555, Warman wrote, possibly shipped in by the Portuguese or on camelback in caravans. At first, the Chinese called it "the wheat of the Western barbarians." Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, 5.6 billion bushels last year. The world's top 10 producers also include Brazil, India, South Africa and Romania. Among the top 10 corn importers are Japan, South Korea, Egypt, Malaysia and Iran.
While the Mexicans always considered themselves "the corn people," today Americans rival them for that title. For every enchilada, chilaquile, chalupa or other Mexican corn dish, Americans can respond with Coca-Cola, pancake syrup, canned soup stock, cereals and thousands of other foods made from corn products that include glucose, maltose, dextrose or fructose.
And while a farmer in Oaxaca can detail 40 varieties she has experimented with, the Web pages of American seed companies and agri-chemical corporations list lab-created seed varieties with hundreds of trait variations for the picky farmer.
"They are no longer just seeds; they are huge investments in technology," says Iowa State's Howell. "When you buy a seed these days, you're buying a form of software."
Ames, Iowa
Kan Wang's corn is grown on the grounds of a 19,000-acre U.S. Army ammunition base in southeastern Iowa. The quarter-acre field is surrounded by a 6-foot fence and a second 2-foot electric mesh fence. Access is through a gate that is either guarded or locked.
The reason is security, obviously. But Wang, a molecular biologist who heads the Plant Transformation Center at Iowa State University, is not protecting her own corn. She's protecting other farmers' fields from the pollen that might spread from her own corn, as required by the federal government.
The precautions are necessary because the corn seeds planted by the Shanghai-born Wang and her team are among the first to contain transplanted genes they hope will someday help produce pharmaceuticals to prevent and cure human disease. Their experiment is aimed at producing a vaccine against the E. coli bacteria, the source of diarrhea and other intestinal disorders.
Using a "gene gun," a chamber about the size of an upright shoe box, they bombard corn-kernel embryos with genes from the non-toxic portion of the E. coli bacteria. Once those embryos have matured into corn, it is fed in wafers to mice, who in response have developed antibodies to the bacteria without getting sick. The next step is to try to duplicate that result in pigs, and the ultimate goal is a vaccine that can protect humans from an illness that kills hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world each year.
Meanwhile, a former ISU student who helped Wang pioneer the technology, a Zimbabwean named Rachel Chikwamba, has moved to South Africa, where she directs research into methods of using corn to produce an HIV vaccine. "I don't know that there is any other crop that has such power," Wang says. "We can do so much good with it. We need to know how to use it."
Such enthusiasm for "pharm corn" fueled a wider biotechnology boom starting in the late 1990s. Convinced that the mass-production capabilities of corn could be harnessed to produce drugs and vaccines cheaply, pharmaceutical companies and agri-science corporations began hyping the possibilities for curing cystic fibrosis, herpes, lung cancer and other diseases.
The initiative paralleled pharmaceutical research using other crops, like safflower, wheat and rice, but corn was the early first choice for bio-pharming enthusiasts. It could mass produce on a huge scale; it was a larger grain, offering more starch to work with; and from their long, shared history, scientists knew a lot about corn, including the fact that its genetic structure was highly dynamic and easily "tricked" into producing foreign proteins needed to make vaccines.
Yet the excitement died off rather precipitously in 2001 after U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors in Nebraska found several stalks of an experimental pharm corn growing among soybeans planted the following year in the same field. The discovery raised the worst fears of pharm-corn critics, who had warned about drugs inadvertently getting into breakfast cereal or other foods and becoming concentrated to the point that they posed a threat to human health. The incident occurred shortly after another lab-altered corn scare, when a strain approved only for animal feed found its way into taco shells shipped across the U.S.
An outcry followed the Nebraska discovery, and the government responded by ordering the incineration of more than 500,000 bushels of soybeans that had made it to a grain elevator. The company who performed the tests, Prodigene, was fined $250,000 for failing to comply with rules on keeping test corn away from other crops.
The end result was the adoption of far tougher federal regulations on field tests, including a requirement that no test corn be grown within a mile of other corn. That made it nearly impossible in a corn state like Iowa or Illinois.
"That early enthusiasm for corn as a [disease-fighting] vehicle has gone way down. It's obviously not zero but people are looking for other things," says Norman Ellstrand, a prominent plant-genetics expert at the University of California-Riverside. Companies can still perform private tests indoors in greenhouses or underground labs, which don't need federal approval. But the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service received only one application this year to test pharm corn outdoors: Kan Wang's.
Born in 1957, Wang remembers corn being part of the food rations the Chinese Communist government gave her family. She says they refused to eat it and instead gave it to cows and chickens. "I hated corn," she says. "We all hated corn."
They were hard times. During Chairman Mao Zedong's notorious "Cultural Revolution," Wang's grandfather lost his accountant's job and the feared Red Guards raided her home. She began work on a pencil factory's assembly line, but studied secretly and eventually thrived in biochemistry once the universities reopened.
After studying human genetics in Belgium, she worked on crop genetics for a U.S. company before coming in 1995 to ISU, where she says the pharm-corn project is actually a side job to her wider work in genetic transformation.
Since the Prodigene incident, Wang and her colleagues at ISU are trying to tackle the larger questions of how to safely grow pharm corn in a way that leaves the public and regulators comfortable with a small but manageable amount of health risk.
As part of that, Wang and a university plant breeder have been working in their army-base test plot to transfer the needed genes into a sterile form of corn plant to eliminate the risk of them spreading through pollen drift. "There are legitimate issues we can't deny," Wang says. "Sometimes we can get too excited."
Biotech enthusiasts say that, as with previous pioneering technologies, it's just a matter of time before the benefits of pharm corn are recognized.
That's the belief of Bill Horan, a farmer who lives two hours north of Ames who grew pharm corn for several years for Wang and a French company. He still talks with excitement about the possibilities of an easily consumed E. coli vaccine made of corn. "Just take a pill and go to Mexico, eat the food, drink the water, no problem," he says. "The [Pentagon] is pretty interested in it. One more thing the soldier doesn't need to worry about. At some point, good science wins."
San Miguel remains a pretty village of terra cotta-tiled roofs and neatly swept streets. But at times, the only sound is the chatter of the old men playing dominoes at Chuey's store, one sign that a centuries-old way of life may be disappearing.
Planting the land used to occupy nearly everyone in San Miguel. Rare was the family without at least a patch from which they harvested maize each autumn, some to feed their cattle, some to grind into flour, mash into masa and pat three times a day into tortillas over a skillet or stone.
For centuries that life was propped up by Mexico's rulers. Until 20 years ago, it was the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, which made sure the corn was purchased and gave a subsidy to families for planting, even when they didn't harvest.
A painful cycle of economic boom and bust persuaded the PRI to abandon the subsidies, opening the economy in the 1980s with free-market reforms that culminated in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. The reforms did wonders for some parts of Mexico, but they assured that much of its corn would be grown more efficiently and cheaply by farmers with computerized, 16-row planters in Illinois and Iowa.
The results of those decisions are now evident in the barren hills of San Miguel. "I quit when they took away the guaranteed price," says Adan Maldonado, 68, one of the domino players. "If we plant a peso, we get back only 50 centavos."
Farmers have turned their attention to exporting cattle or growing agave, and village leaders envision a new highway bringing tourists. But much of the town's youth have gone off to work in nearby Guadalajara, Manzanillo or in faraway Chicago.
Most people buy their tortillas at the store, or from the family with the small tortilla factory in a neighboring town, who make the rounds at dawn selling produce from the back of their truck.
Garcia, his second wife and their youngest five children live off the cows he raises and sells for about $250 each, but he still treks up through the mojote forest to tend his five acres of corn and wild squash. "Here I have passed my life happy. Poor, right? But happy too," he says.
For some villagers, Garcia's stubborn grip on the old corn-planting methods is a source of amusement, even a nuisance. He needs to burn his fields before planting to eliminate pests and infuse the soil with nitrogen, and only the assistance of a bureaucrat friend helped him elude an attempt to stop him because a recent fire got out of control and spread to a neighbor's land.
But fewer people were laughing after the price of store-bought tortillas shot up because of the demand for ethanol. With time, the price for corn in Mexico began to rise, the government began promoting more production, and the old faith in corn started to revive across rural Mexico.
"There are others who say they want to plant now, but it's not for certain," Garcia says. "We'll see what they do." |
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