The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

The Iowa Farmers Cooperative does not write the only check George Naylor will receive for his corn crop this fall. He gets a second check from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—about twenty-eight cents a bushel no matter what the market price of corn is, and considerably more should the price of corn drop below a certain threshold. Let’s say the price of a bushel falls to $1.45, as it most recently did in October 2005. Since the official target price (called the “loan rate”) in Greene County stands at $1.87, the government would then send farmers another $0.42 in “deficiency payments,” for a total of $0.70 for every bushel of corn they can grow. Taken together these federal payments account for nearly half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer and represent roughly a quarter of the $19 billion U.S. taxpayers spend each year on payments to farmers. This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low. In fact, it’s designed to drive prices ever lower, since handing farmers deficiency payments (as compared to the previous system of providing loans to support prices) encourages them to produce as much corn as they possibly can, and then to dump it all on the market no matter what the price—a practice that inevitably pushes prices even lower. And as prices decline, the only way a farmer like George Naylor can keep his income from declining is by producing still more corn. So the mountain grows, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today...