Insecticides, herbicides, fertilizers, large scale, largely hedge rowless farming is here to stay. If we had the 1960 average corn yield of 60-80 buschel to the acre or 35 buschel wheat to the acre we would have $20 corn and $30 wheat. Your $200 a week food bill would zoom to $800-1,000 a week. Organic sounds great, just like green energy, or free love but we cant afford it without a drastically altered lifestyle. And I note people are much in favor of altering other people lifestyle, not their own.
Good points, Jon. For most Iowa farmers, it's a bad year if they don't get 200 bu/acre corn.
Back in the mid-80's, when the Conservation Reserve Program started, I enjoyed hunting pheasants in thousands of acres of grass that had replaced corn and soybean fields in Iowa. But at the same time, because farmers were working less land, they were working it more intensively. Fencerows going away, small wet spots tiled away, little grassy draws plowed up. And as those micro-habitats disappeared, I said to myself: "God help the pheasants if CRP goes away!" Well, there's far less CRP these days, and far fewer pheasants.
A couple months ago, it was the wife's turn behind the wheel as we drove south through central IL. All at once, something odd struck me. I hadn't seen a fence surrounding a field for miles. That's been happening in Iowa too, but the near total absence of fences really caught my attention. Well, they only get in the way if you're a farmer. And if you're not running livestock in the fields to scavenge a little grain after you've harvested, you have no need for them.
