King Corn

Caroline Lepczyk

Sunday May 19th

 

Tonight after dinner we watched a documentary named King Corn. It was a very interesting movie about the story of two young men, Ian and Curt, who found out that the main source of carbon in their bodies was from corn, and therefore moved to Iowa to plant an acre of corn and learn how it is grown and sold. What I found most interesting about the film was that the two men who made the documentary did not know anything about corn before they started. In front of the camera the men asked honest questions and learned about the crop they were planting and what it was used for at the same time that the audience did. This transparency made the documentary easy to understand and keep up with and prevented it from seeming pretentious.

King Corn took place in Greene, Iowa, a town that we’d actually visit later in trip, where both of the filmmakers great grandfathers had lived three generations prior. Greene was a typical Iowa town, small and remarkably similar to Garden City, a small town with few people and an awful lot of conventionally grown corn.

When Ian and Curt first start their project, they have no idea what to expect of growing corn. Right after leasing the land, they sign up for the government program and receive a direct payment of $28, $14 in the spring and $14 in the fall. Next, the boys bought a tank of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer and began to inject it into their fields with the promise that it would increase their crop four times over. Then, when it was time to plant, the boys rented a tractor and put 31,000 GMO corn seeds into their acre in less than a half and hour. The genetically modified property allowed the corn to have herbicide resistance and after the corn had sprouted, allowed the boys to spray an incredibly powerful herbicide that would kill everything in the field except the corn.

In the summer with their corn up and thriving, Ian and Curt set out to discover where their corn would be sold. The boys went to their local corn elevator, or the huge storage sheds located in each Iowa town  to find out where corn from Greene was sent. Although the manager informed them that an acre of corn would be way too small an amount to be tracked out from the elevator, he did explain that most of the corn is either fed to livestock, exported, or turned into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The boys then set out to find both the health effects of HFCS on humans, and of feed corn on cattle. Their study of HFCS led them to New York where they learned that there are corn byproducts in practically everything on grocery shelves, and that when HFCS is not eaten in moderation it can cause monstrously bad health effects including obesity and diabetes. The film actually practically blames the obesity crisis in the United States on HFCS, and in turn corn.  However, the corn-fed beef is not found to be any more positive. The boys quickly learn that cows are supposed to eat grass, and that feeding them corn for over 6 months will flat out kill them. They quickly begin to grow ulcers in their stomachs, and though they gain fat rather quickly, they are terribly unhealthy.

In the fall, the boys collect their corn with a large tractor machine called a combine, which collects the corn and separates it from its leaves and stalks, and sell it at the local elevator. Though they come up a bit short on their budget, $19 in the red, the $28 direct payment from the government offers them a meager profit. However, seeing that they didn’t like the places that their corn would be going, after they sell their crop, the boys buy their acre from the land owner and opt to keep it out of production. Many Midwestern farmers however, cannot afford this luxury. Money is money, and with corn production being around 200 bushels an acre, it can sometimes be quite profitable for farmers to grow corn. This means that as a nation, if we decide that we no longer want farmers to grow corn for HFCS or for feed corn, we will need to consider a monetary incentive for farmers to grow something else.