Chemical-Drenched Corn is Not MAHA-Friendly

Mine is not a left-wing voice of animal rights idealism or return-to-the-land idyllicism. This is just plain old real science.

The MAHA movement has brought food quality, human health, and regenerative farming to the attention of conservatives. Yet articles from across the political spectrum still slander organic, small-scale farming operations as deleterious to the environment and claim that GMO-cropping and factory farms are salutary for American consumers and the world. This isn’t true.

Granted, I’m biased—I’m a farmer and cow owner, so I get defensive about my animals and my way of life. I also wrote a book, replete with a foreword by super-farmer Joel Salatin, laying out a blueprint for what has become the MAHA movement, tellingly titled Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.

Industrial farming is not advantageous for American food security or human health, nor is it environmentally sustainable. Since I’m also an attorney, I will present my case here to you, my jury of readers.

The pitch for factory farms was recently made at National Review, in a piece whose headline displays strange bedfellows: “Factory Farms Are Good for People and the Planet, Argues NYT Column.” Wesley J. Smith approvingly cited NYT author Michael Grunwald in support of this ear-tickling conclusion:

First, we need industrial methods of growing and raising food to prevent too much of the environment from being consumed by agriculture, both plant and animal. And, he notes, we need industrial methods to keep food affordable.

Arguing that “too much of the environment [is] being consumed by agriculture” reflects a dangerous hubris in a society unconcerned with “too much of the environment being consumed” by urban and suburban sprawl and expansive lawns that gobble hundreds of millions of gallons of refined gasoline annually—let alone the nation’s precious underground aquifers drained to feed those abominations rather than the human need for food.

Grunwald’s second defense, the “affordability” of factory food and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), is as old as the wiles of Beelzebub. Measuring food solely in monetary terms ignores the externalized costs of ecotoxins, obesity, cancer, and declining human health that ride in on its “cost-effective” coattails. This is Wendell Berry 101.

Cheap, ultra-processed food production is killing the soil, tainting water and children’s bodies with forever chemicals, and creating threats to national security and long-term food supplies. Ethanol production devours tens of millions of acres through intensive, federally subsidized corn cropping: Is that environmentally “affordable” or “consuming too much land”? What would shifting livestock out of factory confinement and back to grasslands do to reverse carbon loss, break down atmospheric toxins, and improve water and nutrient retention?

Some 92 million acres of corn are sown each year in the United States, in large part to feed cows that could be fed grass. Replacing cows with fake meats will deprive pastures of carbon-sequestering ruminants like the bison that built the American prairies. Instead of concentrating animals in concrete factories and feeding them petroleum-dependent grain crops, they should be rotationally grazed: fewer antibiotics, fewer pesticides and herbicides, and manure spread by the action of bovine legs rather than gargantuan tractors. Replacing natural manures with synthetic factory fertilizers manufactured from natural gas (aka methane) in the name of removing cow farts (aka methane) is a fools’ bargain. The industrial sirens tickle consumer ears with lies.

The nation’s precious aquifers are being steadily depleted to fill swimming pools and water lawns in arid Arizona while Saudi Arabia farms alfalfa to send back home. Cow manure rebuilds soils, feeds soil microbes, and helps the ground retain water—GMO crops and synthetic fertilizers do the opposite. In the name of “preventing too much of the environment being consumed” by agriculture, industrial farming is steadily desertifying the land, creating a wasteland that only livestock on grass can restore.

And what of the fact that Americans throw away some 40% of our food annually? Might reducing food waste reduce agricultural land area, and landfill space to boot?

Mine is not a left-wing voice of animal rights idealism or return-to-the-land idyllicism. This is just plain old real science. Yet Grunwald argues from a blinkered perspective:

Artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for nature than chemical-drenched corn and feedlot-fattened beef because they require much more land for each calorie they produce. In 2021, Sri Lanka’s president banned agricultural chemicals in an effort to force its farmers to go organic, vowing to end industrial farming and get in “sync with nature.” Then farm yields crashed, plunging the country into a food crisis and forcing it to import calories it used to grow itself.

Mr. Grunwald is merely making my case for me. The claim “requiring much more land” no longer holds when you consider that the soil of that “much more land” is being fed and rebuilt using manures, rather than saturated and depleted by chemicals. Sri Lanka’s experience proves the dangers of chemical-dependency, revealing the damage to soils caused by chemical adjuncts, not the need for more of the same toxins as medicine. Accelerating soil erosion increases water loss, necessitating ever greater applications of synthetic adjuncts to maintain industrial crop yields. This is a desecration, not an improvement, of natural processes.

Greenwald’s industrialist sleight of hand continues:

But even though its soybeans and cattle have often invaded forests and wetlands, [industrial agriculture’s] higher yields have spared billions of additional acres of the planet’s ecosystems from destruction, by making more food on existing farmland. The Green Revolution didn’t end deforestation, but few forests would still be standing without it.

False: Industrial agriculture is subjecting prime farmlands to destruction, and so is residential sprawl. Parts of the San Joaquin Valley have subsided dozens of feet due to water drawdowns. Soil erosion is seeding a future dustbowl; see, for example, the dust storms that hit Chicago this spring. Healthy soils sequester far more carbon dioxide than trees and “rewilding.” It is industrial tilling, not peasant farming, that has released carbon dioxide en masse.

This highlights the most significant hidden cost of all: ecotoxins that endure for hundreds of years. Pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides accumulate in mothers’ milk and impair children’s reproductive systems. The factory farming perversely advocated for by Greenwald and Smith channels modern humans into Wal-Mart CAFOs. When will America become “net-zero” of the millions of tons of chemicals churned out of smokestacked factories every year and dumped ubiquitously in our soils, water supplies, and food via synthetic urea, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides?

The answer is, never—so long as the lie is spread that cows are bad for the climate, and that “artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for nature than chemical-drenched corn.” That is simply industry poppycock, now furthered by the New York Times and National Review, in odd tandem.

I rest my case.

(Originally published with Front Porch Republic.)