As the long shadow of the mill suggests, the feedlot is a city built upon America’s mountain of surplus corn—or rather, corn plus the various pharmaceuticals a ruminant must have if it is to tolerate corn. Yet, having started out from George Naylor’s farm, I understood that the corn on which this place runs is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships powered by a very different source of energy—the fossil fuel it takes to grow all that corn. So if the modern CAFO is a city built upon commodity corn, it is a city afloat on an invisible sea of petroleum.
