How Huge Food Corporations Will Make Upcoming Food Price HIkes Even Worse
http://www.alternet.org/food/how-huge-food-corporations-will-make-upcoming-food-price-hikes-even-worse
Farmer George Naylor sounds a little too much like the fictional character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh when I ask about his corn crop. June is usually a wet month, but not this year. One time it “rained” so little it just barely wet the bottom of his rain gauge. Add that to several days of triple-digit temperatures that accelerated evapotranspiration (water loss from his soil and his crop) and his corn is in a sad state. But he’s actually relatively lucky because he is in Iowa, which got some rain early in the season. Farmers in Illinois and Indiana are faring much worse.
The 2012 drought is now the worst drought our country has faced in half a century. As of the end of June, a third of the nation was in severe to extreme drought, and more than half faced moderate to extreme drought. All in all, June ranks as the 14 th warmest and 10 th driest June on record. By the end of July, the USDA had declared 1,584 counties in 32 states as primary disaster areas, making farmers and ranchers in those counties eligible for federal relief programs. Analogies to the Dust Bowl are becoming common.
Most of the time, Americans don’t need to worry much about how the food gets to our table and whether the weather has anything to do with it. It gets hot, and we put on the air conditioning. It doesn’t rain for weeks on end, and we celebrate the sunshine. But now, the fate of the corn crop on Midwestern farms even has comedian Stephen Colbert worried . Agricultural economist Bruce Babcock appeared on his show, warning him that the prices of meat, dairy and eggs will increase because “American livestock are fed a corn-heavy diet.” As Colbert put it, “It is one thing for global warming to make sea levels rise, but nobody told me it would make my cheese levels recede.”
Now is perhaps a good time to reflect on the extent to which the entire American food system is built on one crop – corn. And within that one crop, we rely on a very narrow range of genetics; although there are more than 250 known genetic races of corn, the U.S. almost exclusively relies on just two of them . Because the U.S. is the world’s number-one producer, consumer and exporter of corn, global food prices are also linked to America’s ability to grow corn. This year, we are going to find out what happens when the crop fails in many parts of the country. Now is a good time to ask ourselves: is it smart to bet the global food supply on a few varieties of one crop grown in one country?
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but now the factory farm methods are bearing fruit, so to speak.
"In fact, the Rodale Institute, in its 30-plus-year long Farm Systems Trial , found that organic corn and soy yields match conventional yields in most years but exceed them in drought years. In addition to building up the soil with manure or compost, their methods also improve water retention by utilizing a thick layer of mulch on top of the soil. They also found that organic methods use less energy and sequester more carbon in the soil, helping to mitigate the climate crisis in the long term. "
Organic methods do need to be followed completely -- including tilling only the 1st year, and relying on heavy mulching to suppress weeds thereafter. But when methods are followed, not only are the yields equal or better, the nutritional quality of the produce when you feed the soil and not the plant is also much better. Not to mention flavor and texture. 
