Missouri farmer Blake Hurst takes on the anti-corn zealots.

First Lady Michelle Obama has refused to plant corn in her famous White House organic garden. That’s a direct result of the attack on corn and modern agriculture, led by local and sustainable food advocates, small farm groups, food writers, and the producers of film documentaries. The only kind of corn that would be grown in any garden, organic or not, is sweet corn, and sweet corn is the only thing that makes July survivable in hot Midwestern summers, but never mind. The organic garden is a political exercise, and corn is in bad odor with environmentalists, the New York Times, and Michael Pollan.

According to the narrative, we farmers plant far too much corn; in particular, too much of the kind of corn livestock eat. And we do this even though corn is really cheap.

What’s more, corn has become an industrial product like polypropylene or stainless steel; it’s no longer really food for any creature, great or small. Corn sweetener receives more bad press than methamphetamine, so the Obamas will eat no fresh sweet corn dripping with butter and sprinkled with salt. (President Obama can seem peevish at times; I’d prescribe sweet corn, twice a day, for the week or so that corn from the garden is at its peak.)

The fact that the Obamas are denying themselves a summer treat would be of little concern, except there are other problems with this story. The first is that it doesn’t reflect well on farmers. If we keep planting corn every year even though it never reaches profitable prices, then we farmers are stupid. Even at the risk of appearing irrational, farmers rarely challenge the story. It serves us well to argue from poverty when farm bills are written and subsidy levels decided, when stories appear about the subsidies received by farmers, and when we negotiate with the guy down at John Deere or with the landowner whose farm we want to rent.

Because the agenda of corn’s critics is advanced if farmers buy into the story, it doesn’t serve their ends to paint farmers as idiots. A scapegoat is needed. Hence, farmers plant too much corn because… because… because Earl Butz told us to!

Children of the Corn

Butz, for those who don’t remember, was Secretary of Agriculture for Presidents Nixon and Ford. He famously told farmers to plant “fence row to fence row.” He was no fan of acreage retirement programs: these programs were the main tool in the farm policy toolbox for 60 years, designed to control crop supply to keep prices stable, thus helping us farmers. And he was an ardent advocate for farm exports. He lost his job in 1976 after telling a racial joke.

In the 2007 documentary “King Corn,” Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis interview an aged Butz, and describe how, in their view, Nixon-era farm policies led directly to overproduction of corn and a subsequent rise of obesity in the United States. On camera, Butz is unrepentant, still convinced that paying farmers not to plant was “the stupidest thing we ever did.” The former secretary is proud of the fact that food costs have plummeted as a percentage of the average American’s budget, and reminds Cheney and Ellis that Americans are wealthier today because food costs have declined.

Greg Critser, in his book Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, blames Butz for the use of high fructose corn sweetener, which, according to Critser, has made Americans obese. Richard Manning, in his 2004 screed Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization, claims Butz is responsible for large corn crops and low corn prices.

Farmer Tom Philpott, writing on the occasion of Butz’s death, perhaps best describes the conventional wisdom. According to Philpott, Butz presided over massive cuts in farm subsidies, and more importantly the end of land retirement schemes used to control supply. Philpott describes farm policy from the 1930s until Butz as a sort of Nirvana for both farmers and consumers, as it paid farmers not to farm and kept corn prices high. Butz attempted to end land retirement programs and worked to increase farm exports. This, according to the narrative, was done at the behest of large agribusiness, and led to cheap corn fed to cattle, confined animal operations, corn sweetener in soda pop, and the decline of the small family farmer.

Obviously, farmers produce less when the government pays them not to produce. But most of the criticism of Butz centers on that famous bit of cheerleading. Farmers some 40 years later are producing too much corn, leaving corn prices too cheap and Americans too fat, because Butz urged us to plant fence row to fence row, and told us to “get big or get out.” Butz proclaimed as oracle, and farmers as easily led.

In a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, Pollan credits Butz with single-handedly increasing corn yields:

Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost. The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even.

Pollan is describing a backward-bending supply curve; Butz, a Purdue University-trained economist, is rolling over in his grave.

Read it all.