Movie Review: King Corn

King Corn was released in 2006 and documents the adventures of two recent college graduates from Boston returning to Iowa to grow an acre of corn and follow the corn through it's life. Like much of the corn grown in the US, the corn grown on the King Corn acre was not the sweet corn common on late summer tables, rather it was dent corn aka field corn which is less a food and more a commodity. Dent corn is used as a cheap source of carbohydrates in animal feed (animals will convert the cheap carbs in corn to cheap protein) and also chemically converted to ethanol, high fructose corn syrup and corn oil.
Throughout the movie, the point is reiterated that growing corn for these purposes is itself unprofitable. In order to optimize production, the corn grown requires injecting ammonia into the soil, genetically modified corn and specialized herbicidal chemicals. Gone are the days of the family farm where mom and pop grow on their 40 acres the sustain themselves and take excess to market, rather land is now leased and cultivated in 1000 acre parcels by machinery that would be on the scale of a mining operation than a farm. Despite the efficiencies of scale, only through government subsidies can farmers turn a profit.
In the end, I can't say the movie provides an unbiased look at the factory farming. It does preys on the bucolic image of the family farm to raise contrast to the stark reality of factory farming. Since most viewers have never seen a farm and are unfamiliar with the processes employed to grow and process their food, King Corn, in an attempt to be an understated expose', fails to point out the efficiencies of scale that do come with factory farming. Indeed, an attempt is made to villainize former USDA Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (dec) who revamped the food production industry in the US.
The film does raise interesting questions... Since tax-paying citizens fund the government, we're basically paying to grow food that we can't eat and has little nutritional value; is this the best way to spend our money? Further, Is the trade-off of tax payer based subsidies I wonder, if given the opportunity, would these farmers choose to grow broccoli, cabbage, carrots or one of many more healthy and beneficial crops? What about the costs of environmental damage by pesticides, herbicides and the loss of biodiversity due to monocropping? Could crop rotation be used to mitigate the need for nitrogen injection and chemical sprays? How would our cost of life change if we didn't subsidize corn? How about our national health? Would the cost of sweeteners and other corn-derived products make soda and juice prohibitively expensive, thereby limiting consumption?
It is my hope to explore some of these questions as I develop this blog, so stay tuned to see what turns up.