"America's favorite crop"

One of the first things I realized when watching King Corn was how different it is from other documentaries we’ve seen this semester. All in all, Aaron Woolf’s film is a small production, starting with a total gross profit barely exceeding $100k. King Corn also displays a good amount of educated humor. The plot is based on two recent graduate’s surprising idea: to grow an acre of corn in Iowa and follow it up the food chain.

Despite their playful approach, Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis spotlight compelling facts about today’s food industry. They soon learn that “without any government payments, you’re gonna lose money”. These days, farmers theoretically grow crops at loss; they rely on federal subsidies to make their produce profitable. In fact, farmers can’t even eat their corn! Commodity corn has been so modified that it now needs to be processed before it is fit for human consumption.

 

Ellis and Cheney’s hands-on investigation also reveals key numbers that help further understand what “farming” has become in the U.S. They find out that their 10000 pounds of corn will be allocated as followed within the food industry:

-       3400 pounds will be transformed into ethanol or exported

-       490 pounds will be processed into sweeteners such as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

-       5500 pounds will be used to feed livestock across the country

I wondered how these numbers translated at the “end of the chain.” Here is what I found:

-       Approx. 25 pounds of corn are needed to produce a gallon of ethanol

-       Approx. 35 pounds of corn are used to make a gallon (about 11 pounds) of HFCS 

-       Approx. 7 pounds of grain are fed to hogs per pound of meet packaged at the slaughterhouse 

This means that Ellis and Cheney’s acre of corn would, on average, help produce:

-       68 gallons of ethanol (in the U.S., the amount of corn exported is about the same as the amount used to make ethanol) 

-       14 gallons of HFCS

-       785 pounds of pork