Another way to look at this 10-billion-bushel pile of commodity corn—a naturalist’s way of looking at it *—is that industrial agriculture has introduced a vast new stock of biomass to the environment, creating what amounts to an imbalance—a kind of vacuum in reverse. Ecology teaches that whenever an excess of organic matter arises anywhere in nature, creatures large and small inevitably step forward to consume it, sometimes creating whole new food chains in the process. In this case the creatures feasting on the surplus biomass are both metaphorical and real: There are the agribusiness
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