"We're late." "Ahha." "Hi." "Hello." "I'm going to..." "let me figure out there." "Uh, you're lan?" "Yes." "I'm looking at your hair." "And Curt." "How do you do?" "So have you guys had lunch yet." "I brought a sandwich, so I was going to maybe either grab that or I didn't know if you wanted to go out and get something." "But... or... and what... so we should..." "come in." "Sit down." "I've got two chairs." "When my best friend, Curtis, and I graduated from college, we thought we were done with professors." "And we're supposed to feel like we had our whole lives ahead of us." "But we'd just heard some rather disconcerting news." "Some day, we were going to die." "And maybe sooner than we thought." "For the first time in American history, our generation was at risk of having a shorter life span than our parents." "And it was because of what we ate." "So we started to keep track of what we were eating." "But we found we needed help making sense of our data." "So hair is a continuous recorder." "It's a tape recorder of diet." "And so this hamburger that becomes part of my diet will eventually find its way into my hair." "Ah." "Oh, there it is." "There it is." "All right." "Well, I've analyzed your hair and the real conclusion is that the carbon in your bodies is really... originates from corn." "Corn?" "Corn." "When I'm talking about corn, I'm not talking about corn on the cob." "You know, sweet corn." "I'm talking about the corn that's being used as a material that's going into the foods that we use ubiquitously." "The apple juices and the grape juices that are canned and they say sweet, that's going to be a high fructose corn syrup." "And then you look down the meats... beefs, porks, chicken." "They feed them corn, and that gets turned into their biomass that we consume." "And you walk down the cookie aisle." "Corn starch." "Corn gluten meal." "Hydrolyzed corn protein." "Corn syrup." "Corn starch." "Corn syrup solid." "Corn starch." "Hydrolyzed corn protein." "High fructose corn syrup." "High fructose corn syrup." "Corn King bacon." "For Americans that I've run, the isotope analysis on it, those numbers are showing this huge weight of the influence of corn." ""Mr. Charles Pyatt, 2637 Floyd Line." "Street, Greene, Iowa, 50636." "Dear Mr. Pyatt, I hope December finds you well." "We got your name from a Corn Growers Association." "They suggested you were the kind of guy who might be willing to help us out with a rather unusual idea." "We recently learned that people who grew up eating the way we did are basically made out of corn." What the heck?" ""We're writing with a strange proposal." "We want to move to Iowa and plant a single acre of corn on your land." "We don't know a thing about corn." "It seems like a good time to find out." "Sincerely, lan Cheney and Curtis Ellis."" "Sincerely, lan Cheney and Curtis Ellis."" "I'm moving from Boston to Iowa." "Yeah, I'm going to grow an acre of corn and see what happens with it." "What's up with you?" "How's your high-paying job?" "Ian and I had grown up on the coast." "But for some reason, we felt drawn to the Midwest." "Can I have the, uh, biscuits with gravy?" "Maybe it was because a long time before there was corn in our hair, there was corn in our genes." "By incredible coincidence, lan and I each had a great-grandfather from the same tiny county in rural Iowa." "Three generations after our great-grandparents left, we were moving back, to find out how an acre of corn could get from a field in." "Iowa into our hair." "Well, my dad bought this farm back in the Depression." "Back in '36, I think." "My grandparents lived on the next one down east over here." "And they moved in there in 1900." "Is it always this cold?" "No, sometimes it gets chillier." "This isn't cold." "That's what it looks like." "Where do you think our acre ought to be?" "Right out in here." "And, uh..." "How big's an acre?" "Acre?" "About half." "I would guess, uh, probably about eight rows here." "OK." "Something like that." "Would make... all the way through, as far as you can see, eight rows would make an acre." "So from here... two, three, four, five." "Greene, Iowa." "1,015." "It seemed like we'd been in town 10 minutes, and people already knew what we were up to." "I've heard people talking about it." "You guys are going to plant some corn and kind of watch it grow, I guess." "Merry Christmas." "Merry Christmas." "You know, I remember when he was that big." "You do?" "How's that?" "I" "I'm a very old man." "I think he was living in Boston then." "Oh, huh?" "Yeah." "Greene looked like a lot of." "Midwestern farm towns." "But for us, this place was different." "A hundred years ago, it was the home of Melvin W. Ellis and Claire Eugene Cheney." "People we knew almost nothing about." ""Dear friend, I was very glad to hear from you." "Everything is the same as usual at the store." "That 6 o'clock dinner was something great all right."" "A thousand miles away from where we'd grown up, it was hard to imagine that Iowa had once been home." "There's some Ellises over here in the... in the C section." "And then, there's Cheneys over in that section over there on the other side of the road." "It's the strangest of coincidences that lan and I became friends and our families came from this tiny, tiny town in the middle of the country together." "People moved away and have forgot about the basic tenets of their existence, you know?" "If they really come back and smell the roses, it's all right here." "Farmers property elevator is a very significant part of our economy." "Why is it called an elevator?" "Because you had to have some form of an elevator shaft, or whatever, to get the corn back up in so they could store it." "Remember, I'm not a farmer." "I'm a funeral director." "We do plant things sometimes, but..." "What?" "And what is this here?" "That's excess corn." "That's our overage of corn this year." "The elevator's full." "So does this just get thrown out or..." "No, that's... that will all be shipped out this spring." "But that's what couldn't fit in that huge thing?" "That's right." "That happen every year?" "Well, it has the last few years." "If you were given the power to design an ideal place to grow the corn crop with all of its requirements and all of its characteristics, you would design something that looked very much like Iowa." "Ricardo Salvador is an agronomist at." "Iowa State University." "He agreed to show us the plant we would be growing." "So what you're looking at here is a grass plant." "So it's a very close relative in exactly the same family as the stuff that you have growing in your lawn." "This is, obviously, a gigantic version of those grasses." "Our one-acre lawn would be growing a giant grass whose ancestors looked very different." "Native corn originated in Southern Mexico, but found a happy home in Iowa, a land of fertile soils and humid summers." "Gradually, one type of corn replaced all the others, a versatile crop named yellow dent, which over time came to dominate the entire middle of the country." "We are at the world's only corn palace." "We welcome you here and hope you enjoy the time while you're here." "There we go." "What you see right there is a picture of the very first corn palace." "It was opened in 1892 as a way to show people how we grow things and to get people to come live here." "We had a pretty good idea of what living on a farm would look like... driving tractors, digging in the dirt, growing food." "You can't live without corn." "I mean, it's an everyday part of your life." "You know, you don't even realize it." "The corn palace was a kind of monument to." "America's favorite crop." "And to it's love of family farms." "Maybe even one acre farms like ours." "You got to follow your dream." "And give it your best shot, really." "Everything starts out as a dream." "Hey." "It was going to be a long time before we could do anything we'd thought of as farming." "But on the modern farm, you don't have to wait for the snow to melt before you can get to work." "This looks like the place." "The first thing you should really understand is what the farm program is." "And it's a very complicated program we have now." "OK, so you got corn." "You got one acre." "Here's your base." "Well, here we've got a chart that shows the direct payment on corn is going to be $0.28." "Payment from?" "From The US government." "Whether you like it or not, it's part of growing corn." "Did or will you plant or produce an agricultural commodity on land for which a highly erodible determination has not been made?" "So you're going to get 14 now and you'll get 14 in October." "I don't know a single farm out here that isn't in the government program." "I'll guarantee you, if you go out and just raise an acre of corn without any government payments, you're going to lose money." "Really?" "Definitely." "Just from moving to Greene and telling the government we were going to plant an acre of corn, we were going to get $28." "And the more corn you grow, the more money you get." "We should have grown 1,000 acres." "I just found this the other day and not I got somebody to show it to." "It didn't take long to find relatives in Greene." "Dawn Cheney, the widow of my third cousin, Paul Cheney, lived on the same farm where my great-grandfather grew up." "There's his plane." "Uncle Claire's plane." "Claire Cheney, my great-grandfather, had what looked like a typical childhood on the farm." "There's the silo and there's the farm house." "On the old Cheney farm, they grew almost all the food they ate." "And it looked a lot like the kind of farm we'd grown up imagining." "Ray Cheney." "You think I look like this face?" "Sure you do." "You're a Cheney." "You're a Cheney." "Now, there's the barn." "The Cheney Farm was supported through the years by farm subsidies, an earlier version of the program we'd signed up for." "In those days, the government supported family farms by stabilizing the amount of corn produced each year." "This sometimes meant taking land out of production." "With supply and demand in balance, crop prices stayed high." "For years, the program kept farms, like the Cheneys, afloat by limiting the amount of grain that got to market." "But in 1973, a new Secretary of Agriculture, Earl L. Butz, reoriented the farm program." "What we want out of agriculture is plenty of food." "And that's our drive now." "We have experienced 180 degree turn in the philosophy of our farm programs." "We've abandoned a long-time philosophy of curtailment and cutback to the new philosophy of expansion." "And it makes sense." "On the Cheney land, the old tomato gardens and pastures are now planted almost entirely in corn as part of a neighbor's grain operation." "Even our acre is actually part of a much larger farm run by another neighbor named Rich Johnson." "Well, I grew up, uh, a half a mile just south of this corner here." "We farmed that up there." "And then, this is George." "We farm his land right here." "And then, this is my mom's farm." "We farm that." "And that's our other Greene farm right up there with the big bins on it." "So that's another farm of ours." "Farmers are... the ones that are in it are getting bigger." "You either have to be in it in a pretty good size or you're going to get squeezed out." "How many bushels you expect to get off an acre?" "A thousand." "I think you're dreaming." "One thing I've noticed over the years is the little farmers getting out of it, and the big farmers getting bigger and bigger and bigger." "The government pays the farmers." "And it's just a big grain operation." "And I think they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger." "January soy beans at 545, down 1 and 3/4." "And May soy beans at 548, down 1 and 1/4 cents." "Three fungicides and an insecticide." "What do corn growers really want?" "More corn." "Way, way more corn." ""Go where no one's gone before" more corn." "That's more like it." "Comprised of..." "Curt Ellis." "Nice to meet you." "Ian Cheney." "Hi, lan." "Al Marth." "How you doing?" "Good." "How are you guys doing?" "Good." "What can I help you with today?" "Uh, fertilizer." "Fertilizer, OK." "Uh, what kind of ground are you guys working on?" "Is it a sandier type soil?" "We haven't done any analysis of it." "Brown." "It's a brown soil." "It's a basic brown, Iowa." "OK." "Um, essentially the crop needs nutrients to, uh... in order to produce the maximum yield." "And you want to have the biggest potential out there to get the biggest yield you can." "Past couple years we've had probably 200 bushel corn around here." "And we like that a lot." "So... here you go." "Thanks." "We look like a farmer now." "Stand right in this area." "You'll probably get a good smell of the ammonia." "Oh, yeah." "I get a..." "Any advice for driving with this thing?" "Yeah, don't hit anything." "That's... that's a bad thing." "OK, we know that there's, uh, 43,560 square feet in an acre." "We're going to try to mark out one acre for corn." "Do I push this forward?" "Yeah, push it forward." "I'm terrified." "All right, we're up." "Are you kidding?" "Well, you want to go another round?" "Yeah." "But slower, maybe." "No, we got to go this speed." "Use the brake." "Where's the brake?" "All right, I'm very bad at driving a tractor." "Well, let's go." "All right." "Thanks largely to our 150-pound injection of anhydrous ammonia, we could grow four times as much corn as our great-grandparents could have gotten from the same piece of land." "You got to follow this little line." "Stop." "On almost every farm, there was a tank of ammonia fertilizer." "And it seemed to be working." "Elevators were full in almost every town we saw." "In fact, they were a lot more than full." "Holy shit." "That was fun." "So Mina Wallacer would have been your aunt?" "Mmhmm." "And Melvin Wilbur Ellis was my great-grandfather?" "The closest relative I could find was a third cousin twice removed who explained that my great-grandfather was in the farm machinery business." "That's an Oliver 70 tractor." "Great-grandfather Melvin would have made that?" "His factory in Charles City manufactured those." "Just north of Greene, Melvin W. Ellis ran the Hart-Parr Tractor Works where they built old reliable, the first machine ever to be called a tractor." "That's so cool." "It's awesome." "Well, 1939, just before World War II started, you got an M farm haul and a 10-foot power binder." "Boy, that changed a lot." "As the tractor progressed, you didn't have to... uh, fight with horses all the time." "Hitching them up, harness and feeding, curring them down." "A lot of work." "A lot of work." "As tractors took over work on the farm, a single farmer could work more and more land." "Farm kids, like lan's great-grandfather, didn't have to work in the fields anymore and began leaving the farm to do other things." "Claire Cheney bought one of the first planes in the county, got a job making aerial maps of farm land, and saw from above as corn farms got bigger and bigger." "Today, it's not uncommon for a single farmer in Greene to work 1,000 acres." "And what smaller farms remain are getting consolidated into still larger operations." "There's an awful lot of farmsteads that are just plain disappearing." "You go down the road here." "And well, there used to be the Crow place." "There used to be the Marson's." "There's just so many of the homesteads that are gone." "Get all the housing out of Flag County, it makes it easier for them to farm it." "Because then you don't have all these little houses and stuff in the way." "You can just farm through everything." "And you can get a lot of acreage done if you're not turning around all the time." "It's, uh, the fourth of May today and the ground is fairly good and warm." "We could come in here with a planter who planted." "LibertyLink corn at a population of about 31,000." "31,000?" "Kernels to the acre." "Watch out, birds." "That will take care about your acre right there." "Planting 31,000 seeds was not exactly a hands-on experience." "But then again, it only took us 18 minutes." "You boys get your corn planted?" "Yeah, we did." "Yeah?" "We planted one acre of corn." "All right." "Well, we think we did." "We didn't really see anything go in the ground." "Oh yeah, that's magic." "Do you have anything with corn in it here?" "How's life in the bakery change during planting season?" "Well, we don't see... you don't see the farmers as much." "And for just that brief time." "It doesn't take very long anymore with the equipment they have to get it planted." "And then they're back and twiddling their thumbs until... until it's time to spray something." "What you're growing is an industrialized corn." "It has been changed over, uh, the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years." "Um, with one goal in mind, which is yield." "The way it was done was not to make every plant produce more so much as to make the plants tolerate living close together." "This plant is kind of an urban creature." "It lives in these cities of corn." "We're now up to close to 200 bushels of corn per acre." "That's what, 10,000 pounds?" "Five tons of food from one acre of land." "It's an amazing amount of food." "Whenever I build a fence, I hit a rock." "Maybe we should take one before we go." "Yeah." "Why don't we?" "Have you..." "Pretty awesome." "How you doing?" "Not too bad." "A little greasy there." "Dirt." "June is spring season in Greene." "I wanted to get that chemical down underneath the leaves a little bit, so I..." "I'm using 50 pounds of pressure." "This 90-foot sprayer was going to be the key to fighting the age-old nemesis of farmers everywhere... weeds." "And the first weed we found on our acre was weed." "It's hemp that they used in World War II to make rope out of." "But it's the same plant." "As?" "It just doesn't have the... they claim it don't have the kick to it." "I don't know." "Grows wild." "Well, that's pretty impressive." "You guys will be hunting ditches." "I ain't going to tell you where I found it." "We'll see you." "All right." "Chuck brought us this marijuana." "We got a lot of different variety of weeds out there." "We got, uh, some lamb's quarter." "Our corn seeds had been genetically modified to resist an herbicide called Liberty." "Liberty would kill the weeds, and our LibertyLink corn would continue to grow." "We got to be careful not to put liberty chemical on a cornfield that isn't LibertyLink corn or it will just kill it." "Generally, we don't spray at night, but, uh, there's a big rain scare coming for tomorrow and I'd like to get this over with." "Do you think I can run along and press the button that releases the..." "Uh..." "Liberty?" "When we get to your acre, we'll let you spray your acre." "That sounds good." "I, I used to have these dreams that, uh, I was flying." "You know, flying in dreams." "So, but in the fall, this corn all turns a golden color, sort of like wheat when it's ripe." "So, um, I would always be flying over golden corn." "The corn that was... you know?" "It was beautiful." "The sun would be setting and, uh, and the corn was gold." "So I'm moving back." "In July, my third cousin, Bruce, who has grown up a farm kid in Greene, moved back to town to retire." "Our acre starts about, uh, 50 yards in." "There's a little pink flag stuck in the ground." "Why are we going against the grain here?" "When you come out here, there will be a lot of, like, yellow dust, which is the pollen that travels from those guys down to the ears, which haven't developed yet." "They're like silks." "Pollen gets on the end, the sticky ends of these strands, and then goes down to the individual kernel." "Each silk is attached to an individual kernel-to-be." "The corner of our acre." "Where is it?" "In the corn." "There, look at that." "Where is it?" "Oh, yeah." "Your own hometown." "Woo." "We are in the lovely town of Greene, Iowa, celebrating." "Greene River Days." "I am the queen of Greene." "Yep." "Greene has always been an agricultural community, and." "Iowa, alone, would produce enough corn to feed the entire." "United States." "The agriculture of our great-grandparents had come a long way." "Curt's great-grandfather's tractors had evolved into 32-row planters and sprayers with a 90-foot span." "And if my great-grandfather, Claire, could fly his plane over the corn belt today, he would see more than 2 trillion corn plants... the largest corn crop in American history." "Curtis and I are going to do a taste test on our corn to see how it's coming along." "To see how it's tasting." "It looks good." "It looks great." "It's not very good, lan." "Tastes like saw dust." "I think that looks like the nice corn porridge." "Yeah, it's disgusting." "It tastes like chalk." "I really thought it would taste better." "Tastes like crap." "If you're standing in a field in Iowa, there's an immense amount of food being grown." "None of it edible." "The commodity corn nobody can eat." "It must be processed before we can eat it." "Um, it's a raw materials." "It's a feed stock for all these other processes." "And the irony is that, uh, an Iowa farmer can no longer feed himself." "When we harvest our corn in the fall, its first step toward being processed into food will be a" "7 and 1/2 mile ride down the road to the town elevator." "So in the fall when you do harvest your acre of corn, it will come into the elevator here where we'll pull across a scale, weigh your truck or wagon, and then it will be pulled across to the dump pit, where it will be dumped in" "with a bunch of other corn." "Your acre of corn is impossible to track just because of the sheer volume that we deal with." "It." "We were still months away from harvest, but our work on the farm was basically done." "It was already clear that when the time came to say goodbye to the corn from our acre, we would never know exactly where it would end up." "After the crop is delivered to the elevator, following corn into the food system becomes a game of probabilities." "Of the 10,000 pounds of corn our acre is likely to produce, 32% will be either exported or turned into ethanol." "In neither case, ending up in our food." "Or in our hair." "Ethanol." "But 490 pounds will become sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup." "And more than half our crop, a full 5,500 pounds, will be fed to animals to become meat." "So while our corn matured in the field, we decided to look into its eventual fate and try to go where corn goes." "There's a wall of corn." "We produce quite a little corn on our farm and a lot of it goes into feed." "This is called wet corn gluten feed." "This is a byproduct of the ethanol industry." "It's real flaky and the cattle just love it." "This is, uh... this is high-moisture corn." "This is shelled corn directly out of the field." "This is the third product that we feed to our cattle, which uses corn." "This is called corn silage." "This is the whole plant run through the corn chopper, and it's just another way to utilize all the corn that is grown in the state of Iowa." "There's the corn, the silage, and the hay, and the gluten all right there." "So it's almost all corn?" "Yeah, it's, uh, 60% of the ration is corn, probably." "Look at that man." "Like a mop on his head." "They're really changing their look here." "What are we going to get?" "Can we order now?" "Welcome to McDonald's, may I take your order?" "Hi, yes." "Uh..." "Could I... could I have a Big and Tasty Sandwich and a small fries, please?" "Look at that." "So you're... are you a..." "would you consider yourself corn fed?" "In a manner... yeah, probably." "What are you eating for lunch here, uh, today?" "Cornfed beef." "Do you actually know anything about corn-fed beef?" "You know what it does to them?" "To the cattle?" "Um, it's a good thing they slaughter when they do, because it actually kills them to feed them to make the meat like that." "So they'd be dead in six months anyway, eating that stuff." "So it's just as well that they slaughter them." "Really?" "Yeah, it's terrible." "Where is this?" "Every major confinement feedlot everywhere." "We'd moved to Iowa to grow corn, but to see where corn goes, we would have to leave the corn belt." "How are you?" "Hi." "I'm Curt Ellis." "Curt." "Nice to meet you." "I'm Bob Bledsoe." "Ian Cheney." "Ian?" "Nice to meet you." "Yes, it's cool to look out there at all those cattle and, and feel warm and fuzzy that I'm feeding a lot of American people." "Our operation is that we buy calves and we bring them into the feedlot and feed them for 140, 150 here, and then sell them to the packing plant as fed cattle." "Basically, 14,000 to 16,000 head are finished here." "We don't like being big, but right now you're looking at a family farm in Yuma County, Colorado." "We were still getting used to the new look of the family farm." "But the farms in Colorado did have one major thing in common with the farms we'd seen in Iowa." "We're a cattle company, but we do grow a lot of corn." "About 7,000 acres every year." "And it is all used for animal feed." "The grasslands of Eastern Colorado, where cattle traditionally grazed, have overcome some of the biggest corn farms in the country." "And corn has replaced grass as the principal feed for cattle." "The mass production of corn drives the mass production of animal protein." "Of protein." "In confined operations." "And you got to have cheap feed to do the confinements." "That's my brand." "I just sold these to the feedlot in March." "I really don't have many other alternatives." "At Sue Jarrett's cow-calf operation, we saw how cattle are raised before they go to the feedlot, eating grass on the open range." "When Sue's father ran the ranch, cattle spent almost all their lives eating grass and it took several years to reach market weight." "But in recent years, cattle have begun spending more and more of their lives in feedlots." "They put on weight faster if you don't let them move." "So total confinement, less space for movement." "They eat continually, and you get them into the market, into the food chain." "But cattle were not meant to be on a corn-fed diet for that long." "We used to feed them 60, 90 days was one thing." "Up to 120, you could make it." "You start really pushing cattle on a corn-based diet after that, the ulcers and the stomachs don't... don't take it well, and they start getting sick." "So this is just a hole in the stomach here." "Scientists researching the effects of feeding corn to cattle have developed a method of looking into their actual stomachs during digestion." "It's very warm and it's pretty packed in there." "A hundred years ago, most cattle probably were fed grass, hay, and they were out grazing." "We've gone from really feeding no grain to rations now that contain up to 90% grain." "But these animals evolved not in feeding these high starch or things like corn." "When you feed a lot of corn, more acid's produced, and the animal can get into trouble." "Corn in this environment produces these acids." "The pH drops, and then they succumb to a condition we call acidosis." "And if it's not treated, the animal dies." "The corn fed to cattle is supplemented with low doses of antibiotics that help them combat acidosis." "Livestock now consumes 70% of the antibiotics in the United States." "But antibiotics also help cattle survive the conditions of confinement." "This facility, with more than 100,000 head of cattle, produces as much waste as a city of 1.7 million people." "A lot of people look at these large feedlots now and question whether that's what we should be doing." "But the reason that it's done, it's... it's economic." "And because of the... of the yields on corn, and the amount produced, and the efficiency of producing corn, it's lower cost per unit of usable energy to the animal." "During the last 30 years, corn harvests have increased dramatically." "And the price of corn in real dollars has dropped." "Largely, thanks to a ready supply of cheap corn." "Eastern Colorado is now home to some of the biggest feedlots in the world." "The meat that we eat in this day and age is produced in a feedlot." "It's grain-fed meat." "And we produce a characteristically obese animal." "Um, an animal who's muscle tissue looks more like fat tissue than it does lean meat in wild animals." "And if you look at a T-bone steak from a grain-fed cow, it may have as much as 9 grams of saturated fat, whereas a comparable streak from a grass-fed animal would have" "1.3 grams of saturated fat." "And so this is the meat that we eat in America." "America's favorite meat is ground beef, hamburger meat." "Could I have, uh, the bacon cheeseburger?" "Hamburger meat is really not meat, but it's rather fat disguised as meat." "It contains 65% of its calories by energy as fat." "Oh my god." "It was starting to make a lot of sense why." "Curt and I had found corn in our hair." "America's favorite meat happened to be our favorite, too." "Burgers made from corn-fed beef are cheap and easy to find." "In fact, if you were born in the last 30 years in America, chances are you've only ever tasted corn-fed beef." "If the American people wanted strictly grass-fed beef, we would produce grass-fed beef for them." "But it's definitely more expensive." "And one of the tenets in America is America wants and demands cheap food." "One of the reasons I moved back to Iowa is because I like... and I remembered what it was like when I was a kid." "And, uh, this was so homey to have this little wooden building." "That tiny wooden building was enough to store all the crops of the people around here." "Greene's old grain elevator, which was built in our great-grandfathers' time, had become obsolete, and was being burned down." "It used to all fit in that small wooden building." "And now, you know, it doesn't even fit into the huge concrete structure that we have over there." "The amount of acreage has gone up, and then productivity per acre has gone up." "So the amount of production, it's just incredible." "The corn from our acre would all go to." "Greene's concrete elevator, which was built in the 1970s, a time of dramatic increases in corn harvest." "After decades of subsidy programs and all these incredible regulations on what farmers could grow and how much and where, government was saying, it's all over." "Grow your operation." "You've got to plant more land, plant fence row to fence row, boys." "And buy out your neighbor if he's not willing to grow." "And when we had so much surplus corn and there was such an interest in trying to derive the maximum benefit out of it, investment was made to develop this corn sweetener industry." "I was wondering if it might be possible to visit a corn syrup factory sometime?" "Visit in what sense?" "Curt, uh, sorry I didn't get back to you sooner." "Been in and out of the office." "On-camera?" "Off-camera?" "Oncamera." "We don't allow cameras into the plants." "Look at that." "The real reason for the... the security of these, uh, plants and food processing facilities is as much about the security of the food that's being created as it is your personal safety." "I was wondering whether it's possible to make... make high fructose corn syrup in my home." "Well, um... what, 15.5% dried moisture, separation... make it acidic." "Separate it in the wet milling process." "1% divided by 50." "Leave it there for a while." "Water wash on it." "Once you pour off all that crap, then you're going to go in the bottom." "You're going to have to add water." "OK, thanks so much." "Take care." "Bye." "Oh my goodness, that was a marathon." "All right." "So step one, apparently, is soaking this corn in water that has been heated to 140 degrees." "And we're also supposed to have put in sulfuric acid at 200 parts per million, which is a tiny parts per gallon." "0.0007..." "So 7... 10,000... 7... it's not even... it's not even close to a teaspoon." "It's like you're going to stick your finger in and whatever drops hits the..." "No, man." "I'm not going to do it." "I'm not going to do that." "It'd be so much easier." "What we're looking for is yellow dent number two, so it's already a certain type of corn that will yield a lot of starch." "So this is going to soak for 16 hours to get it soft and begin to separate the starch from the fiber." "All right, day two." "It smells, uh, smells sweet." "What does something sweet smell like?" "Sugar?" "Yes." "There's a lot of "technology," quote, unquote, that goes into making corn sweetener." "All right, step two." "Physically damage the corn." "It doesn't look like a kernel anymore at the end of the process." "But that is part of that innovative system." "The endoamylase enzyme randomly hydrolases alpha 14 glucocidic bonds to reduce the viscosity of a gelatinized starch." "Everything really is a science when you boil it down." "Wow, that's pretty sweet." "It's sweet." "It tastes good." "Hey, look at that." "Prior to about 1970, nobody ate high fructose corn syrup because it was too expensive to make." "Today, the dominate sugar in the Western diet now comes from corn." "Corn is very cheap, so it's beneficial for people that are making processed foods to sweeten their product with high fructose corn syrup because it costs them less, and they save money." "OK." "Right this way." "Food and beverage manufacturers were looking for a lower-cost sugar substitute." "By the late '80s, we had fully taken over half of the sweetening market in the United States." "High fructose corn syrup is known to enhance flavors of spices and fruits." "It lessens the acidic quality of spaghetti sauces." "It provides good browning properties to breads." "It's all a part of a complex, innovative system that makes these foods available to us in such a variety of choices for such low prices." "Every single item I saw in this, uh, aisle, contains corn syrup." "In the last 30 years, America's consumption of table sugar has fallen." "But our overall consumption of sweeteners has gone up more than 30%." "Largely, because of a dramatic increase in our consumption of high fructose corn syrup." "So what's your assessment of the corn crop this year?" "Oh, it looks terrific in this area." "I think we're going to have a big corn crop." "Yeah." "What do you think we're going to yield on our corn here?" "Oh, I would guess you would be someplace between 160 and 180." "But that's just a guess." "I even walked in it." "Everything we'd done on our acre since coming to Iowa had been designed to do one thing... grow as many bushels of corn as possible." "What we hadn't realized was that what we were growing was essentially an acre of sugars." "We know some things just from the factual, analytical standpoint about the corn which is grown in Iowa." "It has been selected for high productivity." "This means high-volume starch production." "Well, you never get something for nothing in the world of biophysics." "And what you give up in the bargain is nutritional value." "Most of what we've done in agricultural... so-called improvements and in food processing have actually degraded our food supply from a nutritional standpoint." "The corn that originally came north from." "Mexico was a grain with a higher protein content." "But as corn was breed for higher productivity, the nature of the corn kernel was transformed." "What's happened is that that increased yield has been mainly an expansion in the endosperm or the starch fraction of the kernel of corn." "And of course, now we're taking that starch and converting it to high fructose corn sweetener, which basically has no nutritional value, only adverse metabolic effects and... and empty calories." "For each kernel of our corn turned into high fructose corn syrup, there's a nearly 70% chance it will end up sweetening a beverage." "Likely headed for a big city far from the corn belt." "In Brooklyn, New York, about 139 million gallons of soda are consumed each year, sweetened by" "20,000 acres of corn." "20,000 acres of corn." "Here right now, we are at, uh, Fifth Avenue in Park." "Slope, Brooklyn, New York." "And you grew up here?" "Grew up right in this neighborhood." "Uh, was born in Methodist Hospital." "We've been growing this acre of corn in Iowa, and trying to figure out where the corn will go when it leaves our farm." "And, uh, so we've been following the story of corn syrup." "Tell you what, just stopping in to a bodega and buying a bottle of soda." "It doesn't matter if it's a Pepsi, a Coke, or... it doesn't matter." "Any soda product contains corn syrup." "There's a soda, I don't know if they still have it out." "It was called Colonial Grape." "That had to be the sweetest grape soda I ever drank." "I..." "I..." "I don't know if it had more sugar or more corn syrup than any other one, but I drank up to two liters a day." "Maybe more." "One of the great changes in the American food supply during the last 20 years is that we are now drinking many more calories than we were before." "And there does seem to be something about drinking calories in the form of soda, for example, that just doesn't generate the stop signals." "I actually never thought that soda would be a large problem to drink." "But, um..." "I can show you a picture over here of the way I..." "I used to be." "I used to weigh over 300 pounds." "That's me right there." "I was a size 60 in pants." "And, um, I stopped drinking soda." "And just by not drinking soda, I lost about, uh... a third of what I weighed." "We have an explosion... oh, obesity." "That's probably the most conspicuous symptom of the nutritional crisis occurring in America." "But the obesity is only just part of it." "High consumption of sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup, has quite adverse metabolic effects." "And what we see in our long-term study is higher risk of type 2 diabetes as well." "Hello." "Hi." "Hi." "Curt Ellis." "Farida Khan." "Nice to meet you." "Diabetes, essentially means that your blood sugar level in the blood is higher than what your pancreas can control and keep in the normal range." "One in eight New Yorkers have diabetes, which either is diagnosed or they don't know if they have diabetes and they remain undiagnosed." "It's not like any other disease that we have where we just give prescriptions and that's the end of it." "Because it's not something that goes away." "Diabetes is a disease and obesity is a disease which is strongly linked to the environmental factor of food and exercise." "What is the cheaper food for people?" "OK?" "I think cost has a lot to do what people buy." "The cheaper food is really not healthy food." "And the main thing is sodas." "Soda is liquid candy." "And people think they're quenching their thirst drinking a glass of soda, but there you have a big, you know, amount of sugar that you're drinking." "In a recent analysis, we found that drinking one soda per day, on average, almost doubled the risk of type 2 diabetes compared to only occasionally having a soda beverage or not at all." "My dad, he had a pain in his toe for over six months." "And he found out he was a diabetic that way." "And they cut his big toe off." "And before my father died, it went from his toe to his foot, to below the knee, to above the knee." "And then, they wanted to start cutting on the other leg." "Um, my dad said no, that was enough." "And he just gave up." "My mom died of a direct result of diabetes." "My grandmother died a direct result of diabetes." "My sister, Madeline, she's been a diabetic for years." "I was recently diagnosed with diabetes." "We don't think of what we're putting into our system." "We don't really think about it." "By the end of September, we'd been corn farmers for almost nine months." "It was becoming clear that our acre wasn't just a game for seeing where food came from." "We were growing an actual crop that was destined to be eaten by actual people." "If you take that meal, you take that McDonald's meal, you don't realize it when you eat it, but you're eating corn." "Beef has been corn-fed." "Soda is corn." "It's all high fructose corn syrup." "It's the main ingredient." "Even the French fries, which are... you know, half the calories in the French fries come from the fat that they're fried in." "And that fat is liable to be corn oil or soy oil." "And so when you're at that McDonald's, you're eating Iowa food." "Everything on your plate is corn." "Three weeks from harvest time, we could see that the agricultural our great-grandparents had helped build was now growing fast food." "It's been a while." "How you doing?" "Good, thanks." "Come on in." "How are things going with you then?" "How'd your crop come out then?" "Well, we haven't harvested it yet." "So we don't know how much..." "What the yield is." "What the yield is and stuff." "But it... from as far as I can tell, it looks like everybody else's corn." "So..." "Yeah, it's standing up." "And..." "It's standing up and it's kind of yellow and hard." "And I think our problem is figuring out what we want to do with it once we harvest it." "Because we've been out figuring out where it could go and none of our options seems particularly attractive." "And I'm not terribly impressed with..." "And you shouldn't be." "You should be impressed at the stupidity." "We aren't growing quality." "We're growing crap." "Poorest quality crap the world's ever seen, we're growing it today." "You don't eat the corn that you grow?" "Nope." "Not saying that I might not grind up a little bit for some corn meal, but I basically don't." "I don't grow, necessarily grow, my corn for food." "I don't care what's done with it." "I'm selling it." "It's the bottom line." "You don't think we have enough corn?" "We've got lots of corn." "Two weeks before harvest, the price for a bushel of corn at the elevator was $1.65." "We had spent $142 to rent the acre." "And with $133.24 for seed and chemicals and $74.68 to rent and run the equipment, our total costs added up to $349.92." "But even if we got a huge yield, like 200 bushels, we would only get paid $330 from the elevator... a loss of $19.92." "It looks like we may lose money growing and selling this corn." "Oh, yeah." "But we might make a little bit." "But you'll make money off the government." "And that's what it's all about." "Well see, you probably only had half of your initial payment." "You get that." "Then you'll get a, uh, countercylical payment." "And now you're going to get a loan deficiency payment." "It's the government payments that are keeping you guys going." "It ain't the value of the crops." "How much money do you think comes into Greene every year from the federal government?" "Oh, it's, by far, the largest industry." "In Greene, by far." "But if it wasn't for that, you wouldn't see the crops planted out here neither." "You wouldn't be raising 11 billion bushels of corn." "Our $19.92 loss was going to be offset by a $28 direct payment from the government and several other subsidy payments that we hadn't even known about." "We happen to have a kind of subsidy system... and we haven't always had it, only for the last 30 years or so... that rewards the over-production of cheap corn." "Corn is the crop we've spent the most money on over the past 10 years." "And so we've got mountains of grain all over the Midwest because the subsidy programs keep the production going full blast." "All that cheap surplus corn goes somewhere." "And in fact, a lot of it's going on to our bodies." "There is a role that the subsidies have played in making the raw material available for an overweight society." "We subsidize the Happy Meals, but we don't subsidize the healthy ones." "There's a very specific history to this." "I mean, how we got to your acre in Iowa." "You really do have to go back to, um, Earl Butz and the revolution in farm policy that happens in the 1970s." "What we want out of agriculture is plenty of food." "And that's our drive now." "This year, 1973, we're going to see the most massive increase in production of farm products ever in the history of this country." "And next year, we're going for a still further increase on top of that as we pull all stops." "Oh, all right." "Just a moment." "Uh, he's expecting you?" "He's got some corn on the door." "Dr. Butz?" "We've been making a film." "And about a year we've spent growing an acre of corn." "Growing an acre of corn, huh?" "Yes, sir." "Well, it's changed from the days when I was your age." "What what part did you play in... in creating the food system that we have today?" "When I was a youngster on the farm, we had this program cutting back on production." "We paid farmers not to produce." "One of the stupidest things that we ever did, I think." "They got paid for not producing instead of paid for producing." "When I became a secretary, we stopped that system." "We've heard from some people that they think there's too much food." "What do you think of that?" "Well, it's the basis of our affluence now, the fact that we've spent this on food." "It's America's best-kept secret." "We feed ourselves with approximately 16% or 17% of our take-home pay." "That's marvelous." "That's a very small chunk to feed ourselves." "That includes all the meals we eat at restaurants, all the fancy do-dads we get in our food system." "It, uh..." "I don't see much room for improvement there, which means we'll spend our surplus cash on something else." "In our great-grandparents' day, families spent twice as much of their income on food, which didn't leave a lot of money or time for other things." "When I grew up, it was hard work." "You got up in the morning and, uh, you went out and did some chores." "Because we always kept our own livestock." "We had our own horses for power." "The labor it took to make an acre of corn or a bushel of corn was tremendous." "It was easy to see why people in our great-grandparents' generation would dedicate their lives to making fieldwork easier and food more affordable by expanding the reach of agriculture and transforming the way we farm." "Rural America has completely changed." "The kind of farm that I grew up on doesn't exist today." "This is a commercial operation." "It used to be a family operation, but it's not anymore." "But as a consequence, we feed ourselves very cheaply now." "You'll see those tremendous fields of corn out there, corn as far as you can see." "That... that's the age of plenty." "It was Earl Butz's farm program that made our great-grandparents' dream of plenty a reality." "We spend less of our income on food than any generation in history." "And fewer of us are needed to produce that food than ever before." "But we also might be the first generation to live in a time when abundance brings too much." "When our great-grandfathers were children growing up in." "Greene, people bragged on 40-bushel harvests." "A hundred years later, we harvested almost 180 bushels, what, for our time, was quite average." "Our small part of the biggest corn harvest in American history." "Well here, first to the farmer here." "And then farmer number two." "And I farmed all my life, practically." "Personally, I don't like the looks of where we're headed, but, uh... maybe... some people say there's no stopping it." "I think we're going to look at industrialized agriculture." "That's really what we're looking at now." "Larger and larger operations all the time." "Well, it's the cheap food policy, let's face it." "As we push the cart down the grocery aisle, we don't really stop and think about everything that has some of our homegrown products in it." "Our big thing is producing as many bushels as we can from the acres that we plant." "Five feet." "OK." "Well, it's kind of an end of another farm family in the community." "Um, Pyatt family's been here in this community for five, six generations and it's just another end of another generation." "You grew up here, right?" "Yeah, born right here in this room." "That's all the farther I ever got in life." "How are you going to feel about leaving Greene?" "Oh, so-so." "I don't know." "We'll see." "We are wondering if there's any way you'd let us try and raise the money to actually buy that acre and..." "You guys... you're going to starve this country."