The second headline, which earns more comments in the local coffee shops, is about the USDA’s midsummer crop report, which concludes that Iowa has bounced back from its spring flooding and the national corn crop will be enormous. Corn futures immediately respond by dropping below the $5.50 mark, lower than they have been all summer and more than $2 a bushel lower than the high market in late June. “We are our own worst enemies,” Hargens concludes. “We make the most money when we grow the biggest crop. But big crops make the price go down.”
Both Hargens and the Christenson brothers have plowed up pasture over the last few years, and expanded their corn acreage. Hargens plowed up 200 acres and planted it to sunflowers. The Christensons planted 500 acres to corn. All around them neighbors are doing the same. With commodity prices booming, who wouldn’t? They are not plowing native prairie, just old Depression-era “blowout” farms that were planted to brome cheatgrass and crested wheat in the ’30s and ’40s to stabilize the soil, and have reverted to pasture over the years. As Hargens notes, “If we farmed the way we used to in the 1930s, we’d have dust storms all over the place. But with ‘no-till’ techniques we don’t have wind storms from erosion, and the wildlife and birds love the old stubble from last year’s crops.” Scott Christenson adds that he and his brother worked with the Natural Resources Conservation Service for five years to plan the plow-up of their old farm.
And yet, between those two farms, 500 new acres have been added to corn production and 200 to sunflowers. Those 700 new acres have been treated with fertilizer and pesticides. Those 700 new acres have been taken out of pheasant-breeding grounds. And 700 acres have been taken out of cattle pasture. Many experts believe that the conversion of pasture to cropland has had a big impact on the sell-off of breeding herds over the last few years.
On the scale of the northern Plains, remote from New Orleans, remote even from the Mississippi, it is hard to imagine that the decisions of one or two farmers can have any impact at all. But the individual decisions of 10,000 farmers, each pursuing his own self-interest, added together, can make a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Massachusetts.
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