All Ears: An Oregonian harvests wisdom in Iowa
Curt Ellis is the little brother of a dear friend of mine. Over the past few years I’ve watched on the sidelines as Curt, Aaron Woolf and Ian Cheney sketched out, filmed, edited, and finally completed their movie King Corn. Phew, what a project! King Corn should be playing in Portland soon. We’ll be sure to let you know when.
–Deborah Kane
All Ears: An Oregonian harvests wisdom in Iowa
Written by Curt Ellis
For Summer 2007
GROWING UP IN THE SUBURBS of Portland, Oregon, my favorite childhood project was planting tomatoes in the vegetable garden I tended with my dad.
We planted on Memorial Day, leaving the house at 6 a.m. to pick up the rented tractor, driving it home with bar-tires buzzing on the pavement, and tilling a neat square on the edge of the yard before breakfast. When the soil was turned, we planted our 50 Willamette tomato seedlings, holding the hose by the base of each one for a count of 20. Dad didn’t enter into our gardening lightly—he had his sights set on the 100 quarts of sauce, juice, soup, and whole-peeled fruit
we’d be lining up in Kerr jars come fall. We were, as he explained, “gardening to win.”
So when my college friend Ian and I arrived in Iowa in January of 2004, eager to grow an acre of yellow dent corn and make a film about our harvest as it became food, I pretty much knew what to expect out of farming. I’d grown up in a garden.
After much anticipation, our first day of chores finally arrived in April, when, following the local protocol, we went to spread fertilizer on our farm. The nutrients, which came in the form of injectable anhydrous ammonia gas, made the farm smell like window cleaner, and the neighbors
stay inside. In the wake of the tractor, our neighbor, Rich, dug down into the soil to find an earthworm, but it wasn’t wriggling when he held it up. “The gas kills everything in a 4-inch swath on either side of the injectors, so most of what was in the soil is dead now,” he said. This was not what I expected to find on the farm.
With or without worms to eat, the spring robins descended on Iowa in May. The grassy contour strips between the fields greened up, and the bare brown soil on our acre dried out. Sure enough, around Memorial Day, it was planting time.
This, too, was a day of surprises. Ian brought out a pair of work gloves a friend had sent him as a gift, but we didn’t need them. We barely touched the dirt. Instead, we drove over it twice in Rich’s tractors, once to prepare the soil and once to set 31,000 seeds in the earth, with a stiff drink to get them growing—a cocktail of herbicide, fungicide, and fertilizer in liquid form. The planting took 18 minutes, and Ian’s gloves stayed clean.
That evening, Rich and his wife Mary invited us over for taco casserole, and showed us their favorite rite of spring—planting sweet corn. “Our Golden Jubilee’s famous around town,” Rich gloated. Leaving the fleet of shiny New Hollands in the machine shed, Rich rolled out on a 1940s Farmall. Mary and Avery, their eldest son, rode backwards on the rusty 4-row planter, using sticks to herd the seeds through the chutes. Addison, age six, ran behind in a cowboy outfit, plastic six-gun blazing.
Planting that small field of sweet corn took more than an hour, and required a family. It seemed a sharp contrast to the chemical-intensive and corn-intensive farms around us. Of the 70 million acres of corn growing in America in 2004 (in the wake of the ethanol boom it’s more like 90 million), only 120,000 acres of the crop were sweet corn, less than two-tenths of a percent of the total.
The statistic was paralleled out on the Johnson farm—of the 2,000 acres of corn and soybeans Rich was growing with his brothers, only that little patch of sweet corn could be eaten directly as food. The rest of his crop would be processed into the polysyllabic staples of the modern diet—high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, feedlot beef, MSG, and xanthan gum—before returning incognito as taco casserole.
By the time we sprayed our own Liberty Link corn in June, we had stopped thinking of our crop as food. If we hadn’t, I don’t know how else we would have felt okay about what we were doing. We doused our cornfield in chemicals nobody wants to eat—atrazine and liberty—and waited for the magic to happen. It did not come inch-by-inch, but foot-by-foot, and field-by-field. Warm nights followed humid days, and the stalks shot skyward.
We were watching fireworks by the Shell Rock River when Dad called from Oregon with an update on the garden. “You know what they say about a good row of sweet corn, ‘knee high by the Fourth of July’—and I think we made it.” But in Iowa, the field of yellow dent was up to our chins. Tassels were forming on the tops of the plants, and one perfect ear was sprouting on each stalk, set as if by ruler at the consistent height only a combine could appreciate.
In the four months before harvest, our field needed no attention. The herbicides had ensured that there would be no weeding, the ammonia meant no need for a side dressing of compost, and the strong stalks required no trellising. While Dad was pulling crabgrass and training beans onto stakes, we left for vacation—along with a lot of other Corn Belt farmers.
In western Iowa we saw the plant that had burned natural gas to make our ammonia. In Louisiana we saw the “Dead Zone” our nutrient-rich runoff had fueled, and the shrimping community it had devastated. In San Francisco we saw the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and learned of their hopes for a future of advances in productivity and processing fueled by corn. And in Washington we met the legislators and lobbyists who unanimously described America’s as “the safest, most abundant, most affordable food system in the world.”
When we harvested our acre of corn in November, Dad was at home putting the last of the tomatoes into jars. He had picked them and picked them over, pared away their blemishes and rotten spots, blanched and skinned and stewed the fruit until the whole house smelled of salt. A year of weekends was hot-packed into quart jars, and lined up in the pantry for winter.
Next to our harvest in Iowa, it seemed a humble yield. A row of Kerr jars? Our combine mowed down the field in four passes, each cutting a sixteen-foot swath, and dumped 10,000 pounds of food into the hopper. The machine ground away at its combined tasks, harvesting and threshing eight stalks at a time, and in the cab we played the stereo.
When we tallied our work on our corn farm in Iowa, Ian and I had spent less than two hours of our year working that land, and we’d grown five tons of food. Dad’s math was vastly different—he’d spent 20 Saturdays weeding, 150 nights watering, and two weekends putting up his harvest. By the measure of the modern food system, Ian and I had farmed and won—only truth be told, we didn’t much want to eat what our garden had grown.
Curt created the feature documentary “King Corn” with Director Aaron Woolf and Co-Producer Ian Cheney. More information and DVDs are available at www.KingCorn.net.
