Corn Queen

On a recent trip to stay with some farmer friends in western Massachusetts, they served us fresh homemade tortillas with an impressive array of farm fresh toppings. A disproportionate amount of our family meals are burritos/tacos and so this was a familiar meal. However the flavor and fresh taste of the tortillas was a revelation for all of us. We typically use organic wheat flour tortillas, from a company in Colorado, and here we were eating a local solution. Our friends had made the best tasting tortillas from corn they grew on their farm (Sawyer Farm)! I was enthralled and determined to bring this to our kitchen at home.

Growing up in Boston the word corn meant one thing: summer evenings, melted butter and corn on the cob. Somehow this popular conception of what the word corn means to most Americans represents the obscured and perhaps intentionally hidden world of corn cultivation in the US. I was not raised on a farm and, for most of my young life, farming and food meant growing vegetables like we did in our garden. As a young adult my perception and awareness of food and food systems began to expand. In high school and then for a year before college I lived in Spain, learning the language, people and landscape of someplace new. I remember seeing agriculture for the first time out the window of a bus, picking olives from olive trees older than my grandparents, and learning to make smoked chorizo from a butcher in a small town in northern Spain. My curiosity accompanied me back across the Atlantic to my home country. I didn’t remember many farms out the bus window from my childhood, perhaps I just had not been looking?

I attended Earlham College in Richmond, IN and saw many acres of farm land on that first drive from Boston to Indiana. But farms didn’t look like where food comes from. Big barns, silos, and endless fields of corn hardly seemed like food, at least for a country that doesn’t eat that many corn tortillas. During college I returned to Spain to study at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where I met my now dear friend Pablo. One of our early shared interests was film and particularly documentary film. I don’t remember how, but we stumbled upon the little known documentary film that had just come out called King Corn. (now available on Youtube). I can still recall the dim light of the upstairs room where we watched the film and the stunned feeling of understanding. The film opened my mind to the vast and far reaching affects of how our food is produced and the seemingly endless pursuit of cheap food for many and high profits for few in our American food system.

This holiday season I found a new perspective on a plant that has defined so much of how and why we run a farm. On the one hand corn is a huge and defining feature of agriculture in our country. On the other hand some anthropologists have made the argument that corn as a plant contributed to the development to human civilization. We’ve been eating corn for more than 9,000 years and most of that corn was nixtamalized just like the corn Lovett and I rolled up into our little balls of corn masa. We pressed the tortillas and ate the fluffy, sweet corn tortillas and I could not help but smile at the delicious taste.

The US produced roughly 350 million tons of corn this year; that could be a LOT of tortillas. But according to a USDA report in October, we don’t eat much of the corn we produce, at least not directly. Only about 28 million tons (8%) is actually consumed as corn in its original form (cornmeal, corn flour and the like). I was not surprised to see that 42% of corn is used to feed livestock. I tried to find numbers on how much corn is fed to which animal group, and my results varied enough that I won’t be specific. However, it was clear that bovines (beef and dairy cattle) consume more corn than any other livestock group. Bovines digestive system is designed to eat grass! I was dismayed to see that another 42% of corn is used to make alcohol for fuel use and just 16% is used for other “food, seed and industrial use.” USDA defines this category as follows:

During processing, corn is either wet or dry milled depending on the desired end products:

– Wet millers process corn into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), glucose and dextrose, starch, corn oil, beverage alcohol, industrial alcohol, and fuel ethanol.

– Dry millers process corn into flakes for cereal, corn flour, corn grits, corn meal, and brewers grits for beer production.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgrains/feedgrains-sector-at-a-glance/

What assumptions can we make about how this corn was grown? In the last few years organic corn has risen to 0.9% of total corn production. 0.9%! Which is to say that 99.1% of corn is conventionally grown. Simply put, this means lots of chemicals are used to produce lots of corn. (Here’s a recent blog of mine with some more info on corn production). This is why it is so important to us what our animals eat and where it comes from. Purchasing organic grain for our pigs and chickens is our way of supporting the farmers who choose to be in that less than 1%. When you purchase from us, you support them too. I turned to Racey as I was writing this, deep in my thinking and research around US corn markets and statistics and I said: “How do we turn this ship? It seems like trying to turn an ocean liner with a canoe paddle!” Racey responded with a smile: “one stroke at a time.”

Lovett and I finished our tortillas and dinner brought me back from my corn reverie. The next day Racey and I had one of our favorite meals: all-farm savory grits. I made the hominy grits from the same corn masa we made our tortillas with, all from whole corn from our friends down the road at Adirondack Hay and Grains. Eggs are from our neighbors at Full And By Farm, vegetables from our home garden and pork from our farm. Even the eggs are cooked in our schmaltz. Only the salt comes from far away.

We farm to make this kind of eating easier and more accessible for more people. How can we move the needle on your ways farming affects our land, communities and country? One stroke at a time.