The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Frost on Global Markets

Across the farmlands of the Midwest, global warming just got mixed with globalization. The result shapes up as a strange and contentious year with a potential impact on food prices around the globe.

As every Midwesterner knows, we're living through a weird spring. A relatively dry winter was followed by temperatures which soared into the 70s in March and stayed there. In Chicago, trees that stay bare through April sprouted leaves in March. On fruit farms, apricot and other trees flowered three to four weeks ahead of schedule.

For many corn farmers, the balmy climate provided a temptation too strong to resist. Some played it safe, delaying planting until late April, to get past the frequent April frosts. But early planting can extend the growing season and produce a bigger crop later on, so many farmers were in the fields in March, a month ahead of schedule. By mid-April, fully 59 percent of the Illinois corn crop had already been planted, compared to only 10 percent last year and 17 percent in a normal year.

Icarus on the Farm

All farmers keep a constant eye on the horizon, watching for the cloud that might bring rain to nourish the crops or hail to destroy them. As the new year dawned, the most ominous financial cloud in a generation appeared on the horizon of the rural Midwest. Even farmers too young to remember the last big storm would be wise to get their financial crib doors shut before the next one hits.

It seems cruel to sound this warning just now. At the moment, farming is the one prosperous part of the American economy. Farmers are getting prices which, if not records, are very high. Corn is rising again, to about $6.50 a bushel. Soybeans are also up, to about $12 a bushel. The price of farm land has never been higher. The average price of an Iowa acre shot up no less than 32 percent last year, to $6,700: Illinois and Indiana aren't far behind. Sales of $10,000 per acre or more are common.

The real estate market may be dead everywhere else, but not down on the farm. In a recession-weary nation, it's great to be a Midwestern farmer. 

So what's the problem? What's the cloud that threatens to rain on the rural picnic?

A Farmer's Tale: Political Folly and the Fed

I once spent a long, agonizing evening in a decaying farmhouse in eastern Iowa, watching a young farmer's life fall apart.

I still think of that farmer, nearly 30 years later, whenever I hear presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Ron Paul condemn the Federal Reserve Bank as the root of all evil and its policies as unconstitutional. Maybe they don't know they're playing with fire. Maybe they do, and don't care.

Pulling the Plug on Ethanol

The end may be in sight for government subsidies for corn ethanol. It's a hard thing for a native Iowan to say, but it's about time. Always a boondoggle, these subsidies have now become a boondoggle that we -- the United States and the world -- can no longer afford.

Two recent Senate votes sent contradictory messages. First, the Senate voted, 59 to 40, against a message to eliminate the 45-cent-per-gallon tax break which the government gives ethanol refiners. Then it turned around and voted, 73 to 27, for another bill to both end these credits and to wipe out a tariff on imports Brazilian ethanol, which is made from sugar cane and competes with corn ethanol. For various procedural reasons, neither vote is final.

But the tax credits expire at the end of the year. Renewing them looks like a battle for their corn-state backers. After all, getting rid of these credits would save $6 billion per year from a budget already badly in deficit. With pressure to cut spending on education and other truly vital programs, it only made sense to stop wasting money on non-essentials, like ethanol.

Corn-based ethanol uses the energy in corn kernels to produce a biofuel additive that can be mixed into ordinary carbon-based gasoline. It's easy to make, which is why there are so many ethanol plants around. The use of ethanol in fuel replaces imported oil -- not on a one-to-one basis, but close -- reducing our dependence on suppliers in the Middle East. Its use increases the demand for corn, raising income for farmers. Ethanol mills provide good jobs, largely in rural areas where jobs of any sort are scarce.

So what's not to like? Quite a lot, in fact.  

The Foodie Attack on Food

The New York Times has done it again. Or rather, its Sunday Magazine has done it again. For the second year in a row, it has published its annual Food Issue without a word about most of the people who grow America's food or most of the people who eat it.

The issue was devoted to "food as community," which is fine for the people one sees in Gourmet Magazine, gathered outdoors around a rustic table, beneath a grape arbor, ingesting the artisanal grub they have spent the previous three days cooking. It has nothing to do with "food as food," which is the concern of the vast majority of America's farmers and eaters.

Bad Eggs and the Future of Farming

Wright County, in north central Iowa, is on the map these days for reasons it would rather forget. It's the home of the DeCoster family and their Wright County Egg, the lead company in a massive recall of 550 million eggs linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak.

There's not much good to be said about the DeCoster operation, which has been in trouble with environmental officials and the law in Iowa and other states and was once branded a "habitual" violator by the state of Iowa.

But both Wright County and the DeCosters are bellwethers of global agriculture and its impact on the Midwest. There's more to this story than just one big rogue outfit.

Reports from Wright County itself indicate that the DeCosters aren't all bad, that they get high marks from locals for their substantial philanthropy to the local library or their support for local festivals. When I first read this, I thought that Wright County must be one of those impoverished Iowa rural counties which is so grateful for any business or jobs that it's willing to harbor and excuse a serial polluter to get them.

There's more to it than that. Actually, Wright County is one of the wealthiest counties in Iowa. Its per capita income of $44,372 (2008 figures) is the third highest in the state. Its unemployment rate is usually around 4 percent and is only 7 percent now, well below the national average. Two of its hospitals are expanding. So are its schools.

On the other hand, it's one of the majority of Iowa counties that is shrinking -- 12,700 people, down from 19,000 in 1960. The long-term decline would be even worse if it wasn't for an influx of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, that make up nearly 10 percent of its population.

I talked with Denny Bowman, who runs the economic development department in Wright County. From what he said and the other stories since the egg scandal broke, it's clear that Wright County is an epicenter of global agriculture, which is to say big farming.

The Real Future of Farming

The New York Times has just published a story in its Sunday Magazine that managed, in a thousand words or so, both to tell something good about Midwestern kids and to display what's wrong with most writing about American farming.  

The story featured Alexandra Reau, a 14-year-old girl in Petersburg, Mich., who has developed a nice business growing all manner of vegetables and herbs in her family's yard and selling them directly to people in the neighborhood. Alexandra is part of the CSA (community-supported agriculture) movement that aims to get fresh produce to customers who pay a flat fee for regularly-delivered boxes of fruits and vegetables. Alexandra sounds like a bright, sweet and ambitious girl, making money for college while learning about plants and how they grow.

Andrea, say the Times, is a "quiet honor student with demurely made-up eyes." And then it asks, gratuitously, "Who says the face of American farming is a 57-year-old man with a John Deere cap?"

Well, everybody who knows anything about American farming, that's who. It should be possible to write about a nice kid growing tomatoes and zucchini in her backyard without succumbing to the urban bias to demonize the people who grow most of America's food. But the Times, as usual, succumbed.