It’s wild that in an age when we can stream live video from a telephone onto the internet, travel anywhere in the world in less than a day, fly to the moon if we want to and isolate genetic information in tiny DNA samples we are still slaves to the whims of the weather, and it’s showing this winter.

Heavy snowfalls in the Midwest are causing concern for farmers and agricultural forecasters as they are further delaying the already slow harvest season this year. According to Reuters, up to 100 million bushels of U.S. corn could be lost due to the snowstorms. In the most telling of any statistic, corn futures are up 1%.

According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, 5% of the year’s corn crop is still in the field- and with as much as 25 inches of snow falling North Dakota and significant amounts falling elsewhere in the Midwest (Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, etc.) there is little chance that the corn will come out of the field anytime this year.

"There are 620 million bushels left in the field and we could lose 10 percent of that," said analyst Joe Victor from Allendale Inc.

An estimated 50-100 million bushels of corn will be lost due to severe weather concerns.
Buried in an article I read about this, though, is that this year will still be the second largest corn crop on record! Even with a loss of 50 million + bushels of corn- wild.

When I first heard this news I was thinking- oh great, everything is made out of corn and it will all go up in price this summer- we’re going to get nailed just as we were going to recover from the recession with skyrocketing costs for the food we eat and all because we are dependent on corn for so much of what we eat. All those processed foods in the middle of the grocery store? Corn. Everything you eat with High Fructose Corn Syrup? Corn. Etc. We all know this now.

But this kind of weather issue should snap us all out of it a bit and alert us to the fact that we are more dependent on corn than we should be and more than we need to be. The same way we are, to a certain extent, slaves to OPEC because of the oil trade, we are dependent in the same way on corn. Switching from a corn-based food system to something more diverse (again, mind you, as that is how the food system is supposed to be) will be difficult and bring out the lobbyists- imagine the rage of high fructose corn syrup salespeople if their profit margins are threatened?

Not sweet.

In general- we need to drop our dependence on something as singular as corn- we need to diversify the food supply, and we need to make it so that our crop yields are more dynamic. It’s a matter of national importance, national independence, and national security, to a certain point.

It’s not going to stop snowing anytime soon, that’s for sure, but we can stop depending on corn so much.

Photo Credit: Sasakei (via Flickr under CCL)