Today, corn is the world's most important crop in terms of annual harvest weight. It has been put on a pedestal by the Green Revolution following WWII, not to be confused with the amorphous, nameless, grassroots movement happening worldwide today. The Green Revolution transformed agriculture worldwide to depend on monocultures of hybrid seeds created in research laboratories and inputs of increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. These transformations mechanized agriculture, which increased yields and provided cheap food all over the world. But the system was powered by cheap fossil fuels and took the knowledge and resources of farming out of the hands of farmers and centralized them in the hands of corporations or universities largely funded by corporations.
The Green Revolution made traditional agricultural practices evolved over hundreds or thousands of years obsolete because the hybrids and fertilizers could boost yields to create unheard of amounts of food per acre. In Mexico, the Green Revolution almost entirely eliminated the ancient farming practice called the milpa, which is a field interplanted with corn, beans, squash, avocados, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and mucuna. Milpas are regarded by scholars in many academic fields as the most intelligent farming in human history. Here is a passage from 1491 by Charles Mann that describes the milpa.
"In nature, wild beans and squash often grow in the same field as teosinte, [an extinct, ancient relative of corn possibly used in combination with other species to create corn] the beans using the tall teosinte as a ladder to climb toward the sun; below ground, the beans' nitrogen-fixing roots provide nutrients needed by the teosinte. The milpa is an elaboration of this natural situation, unlike ordinary farms, which involve single-crop expanses of a sort rarely observed in unplowed landscapes.
Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary. Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin; diets with too much maize can lead to protein deficiency and pellagra, a disease caused by lack of niacin. Beans have both lysine and tryptophan, but not the amino acids cysteine and methionin, which are provided by the maize...Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats." (p. 198)
The milpa, which has been adopted by Permaculture, also naturally replenishes the soil with the nutrients to continually replant in the same soil. When interplanted as a guild, each species has certain qualities that take advantage of existing natural systems to provide nutrients to humans permanently, thus Permaculture. When Europeans arrived to the Americas, there were milpas that grew uninterrupted for thousands of acres year after year. Government and business powers proved that this holistic approach to farming, nutrition, and land use management was obsolete in a post WWII planet with increasing urbanization, population pressures, and access to cheap fossil fuels.
Today, just a few massive corporations own all of the hybrid seeds used by farmers today. The crop that benefited the most from this transformation was corn, especially in America. American agriculture and food corporations rely on government subsidies and cheap oil to turn corn into thousands of "clever variations" as Michael Pollan puts it in Omnivore's Dilemma. Most corn is processed into odd forms of feed for cattle, chickens, and pigs. A large portion is also turned into high fructose corn syrup, glucose, partially hydrogenated oil, and so many other hard to pronounce and frightening variations. In an average grocery store, more than 95 percent of the products on the shelves contain some form of corn.
Why corn? Corn growing and harvesting works well with mechanization, it is easy to store, and it grows well in lots of different soils and a wide range of warm and cool climates. Thus, it was a source of wealth for America. We could export and store surpluses. We could trade it globally for oil at a ratio of 1 to 1 until the early 1970s. Then America hit peak oil in 1970, OPEC staged an embargo in 1973, and the ratio has shot up ever since, and not in our favor. Current prices are at a ratio of about 14:1.
So what the hell do we do with an agricultural infrastructure set up for corn? Turn everything we depend on into some manipulation of the crop. Now we hear elected officials and spokespeople for Chevron talking about using corn to make ethanol for our cars! America's corn based foods are responsible for our obesity epidemic. We are overfed, but undernourished. According to Food Inc., 1 in 3 children born in the U.S. today will have childhood diabetes, for children of color the epidemic jumps to 1 in 2. Like Majora Carter says, our current sustainability problems are fundamentally linked to poverty, and thus linked to race. Although all of us cannot avoid eating products of industrial agriculture, our mobility to opt into a sustainable food system is linked to our wealth, our education, and our skin color.
There were more than 100 million people living in the Americas before Columbus, far more than lived in Europe, who had consumed corn as the centerpiece of their diet. However, they did not have United States health, soil, and water issues because they developed the milpa. In addition, indians cooked corn with lime (the mineral, not the fruit), which unlocked the niacin in the corn to allow the human body to absorb it. Recognizing the intelligence of traditional practices is a key component of Descent Culture. Wisdom is held in evolution, in gradual developments implemented in response to natural conditions. Descent does not promote some false sense of nostalgia to get back to an ancient, "natural" way of life the way the Business-As-Usual ascent culture promotes growth and technology blindly. Plant a regionally adapted version of a milpa in your garden to work toward sustainable sources of food that can exist after cheap fossil fuels.
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