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Impact of modern technology on farming essay
How has technology changed agriculture
How has technology changed agriculture
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This highly influential and informational documentary about corn is told and experienced by two college friends Ian and Curt. These two best friends move from the east coast straight to the heart of their food’s location, the Midwest. Through the help from helpful neighbors and genetically engineered seeds they plant and produce their own crop of corn on just one acre of Iowa soil. After their attempt to follow their corn into the food system of America they wonder about the food we eat and how we farm. The two meet with the man who changed farming in America forever, Earl Butz and learn more than they ever thought they would about one crop.
After viewing this documentary to the best of my ability I have learned numerous facts about corn and its pros/cons. Corn is stored in a silo and when an overflow occurs mountains of corn are made outside of the silos. This corn grown in the Midwest is in almost all of the food in every supermarket ranging from steak sauce to syrup to lasagna. Majority of its use is as a sweetener in the form of corn syrup or high
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fructose corn syrup. The syrup used to drown pancakes and waffles for breakfast almost always has corn added to it in the form of its sweetener. Out of the entire U.S., the Midwest is considered to have the ideal conditions for growing corn, especially on a commercial scale. Corn made its way from Southern Mexico, its origin, all over the U.S but most highly concentrated in the Midwest such as Iowa. Since the 1970s the American government has been paying our farmers to keep growing this cheap, affordable crop to keep production rates up. After growing their one acre of corn, Ian and Curtis could only get fourteen dollars for their one acre bumper crop. This and its increase in demand is considered to be the reason for the prodigious growth in size of farms across the country. With this large increase of production the use of ammonia in fertilizers has become abundant. By using ammonia, famers can yield as much as four times the amount of corn as they usually would practicing regular farming. “King Corn” was one of the more interesting and eye-opening documentaries I have had the privilege of watching.
Throughout the entire film I was absorbing new facts and information not only about corn but about the history of our agricultural society, its uses, and who had hands in changing the way we farm. Ian and Curtis’s interview with Earl Butz was the most exciting and interesting point in this film. Butz is one of the most influential people in America’s agricultural history by taking a small industry and creating one of the largest in the world. His switch to a more commercialized farming changes the way we eat and farm for the rest of history. Hearing the story of the old way of farming as compared to the way it is done today is unbelievable and even more remarkable from Earl Butz’s point of view. Butz’s story truly spoke to me because he understood how farming was and how it will never be
again.
In Kansas, he speaks to a farmer, who relays the transformation of American agriculture from subsistence farming to commercial farming via the tale of his family. The farmer’s deceased relative had only grown enough for his family and livestock. Additionally, the grandfather’s field had been the size of only one of his grandson’s fields. At this time, Kwon discusses one of the United States’ largest crops: corn. The host discusses the idea that corn is found in almost all prepackaged foods, and that it makes it possible to produce beef at an industrial scale, as it is fed to cows. Thus, American companies prove able to export beef around the world. Kwon continues the television program by discussing means to keep crop pests at bay, a task that the post-war chemical industry revolutionized. Today, there are 3,500 aerial crop-protection pilots in the United States, offering forty to fifty pesticide products. Farmers, in turn, hire these pilots to tend to pesticide issues. Additionally, as Kwon points out, farmers have begun to hire companies to harvest crops, and bees are sent around the country for the purposes of
In the New York Times article “When a Crop Becomes a King”, author Michael Pollan argues there is an overproduction of corn that does more harm than it does good. He writes this in response to a farm bill signed by then President Bush to increase the budget for corn production which caused much controversy. Pollan uses an infuriated and frustrated tone in order to convince American consumers that corn has taken over their environment and economy. Michael Pollan uses rhetorical strategies to challenge conventional views of corn and to argue against additional corn production.
Food Inc. is a documentary displaying the United States food industry in a negative light by revealing the inhumane, eye opening, worst case scenario processes of commercial farming for large corporate food manufacturing companies. Food Inc. discusses, at length, the changes that society and the audience at home can make to their grocery shopping habits to enable a more sustainable future for all involved.
Sheshadri, T. (2001, December 26). Student recognized for agricultural acumen. The San Diego Union Tribune, N1-4. Retrieved on March 20, 2002 from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (Newspapers) on the World Wide Web: http://www.lexisnexis.com/universe.htm.
Selling corn in massive quantity can lead to a greater profit. An ear of corn may averages about eight-hundred kernels in sixteen rows and a pound of corn consists of approximately 1,300 kernels. One-hundred bushels of corn makes approximately 7,280,000 kernels. Every year, a single U.S. Farmer may provides food and fiber for 129 people in the U.S. and 32 overseas. In the U.S., corn production is 2 times that of any other crop. Over 55% of Iowa’s corn goes to foreign markets and the rest is used in other parts of the United States of America.
Corn subsidies are driven by the major food and gas companies in our country that want to dictate what food we put in our plate and what fuel we put in our cars. The companies can do this because of the artificially low price tag on the items they sell because of the cheap cost to produce corn. The only concern for the major corporations is to please their respective shareholders by delivering high profits. They are certainly not concerned with the health of the consumer or the environment.
Corn soon became the crop of choice to Iowa farmers. They found that it was more resistant to disease than the other crops they were growing, such as barley, oats, wheat, and apples. With this newfound “wonder crop”, Iowans found that farming had become the ideal way of life. Working on the farm involved all of the members of the family, which brought them together and made them stronger through hardships and great opportunities.
Genetically modified? That alone should be a cause for alarm, and have you wondering, what exactly is in this that I am eating? Yet every day millions of American’s choose to load up on food filled with GMO’s, and not even know it. First we must understand what GMO’s are. GMO’s are any organism whose genetics has been altered using genetic engineering. We should not be tampering with nature, and should try to grow organically as much as possible. There has not been enough research on GMO’s to know the potential long term effects it can have on us, so this is why GMO’s should be banned.
...nergy from an acre of Iowa farmland. Unfortunately, for more than fifty years, farm policies is designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. It simply because the government subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country. While the surgeon general is warning the epidemic of obesity, our government is still signing bills encouraging the river of cheap corn flowing. It is clearly shown that food production in America is partly a mixture of politic, economic and morality.
The country at the time was in the deepest and soon to be longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world and this caused years of over-cultivation of wheat, because “during the laissez-faire, expansionist 1920’s the plains were extensively and put to wheat - turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced highly unprecedented harvests” (Worster 12). The farmer’s actions were prompted by the economic decline America was facing. With the economy in a recession, farmers were looking for a way to make a living and in 1930 wheat crops were becoming very popular. In 1931 the wheat crop was considered a bumper crop with over twelve million bushels of wheat. Wheat was emerging all over the plains.
Currently, the United States is the largest producer of corn in the world. In 2010, it produced 32% of the world’s corn crop. Corn is grown on approximately 400,000 U.S. farms, showing the importance of corn in the United States’ diets. Twenty percent of the corn produced is exported and corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country (National Corn Grower's Associatio...
The 1920’s were the singularly most influential years of farming in our country. The loss of farms following the war, and new agricultural practices resulted in the dawn of modern agriculture in our country. The shift from small family to big corporation during this time is now the basis for how our society deals with food today. Traditional farming in the 1920’s underwent a series of massive transitions following WWI as the number of farms decreased and the size of farms increased.
Given the amount of resources that the world as a whole has access to why use corn as a source of fuel? Some would say that countries, such as the United States have an overabundance of food produce. Logically, those countries that have an over surplus of food MUST have enough to put a dent into the rapidly increasing costs of oil and gasoline. Unfortunately, that is a misconception. In order to produce enough corn to fuel the global economy it is important to analyze what that actually means for farmers and the government, not to mention the actual food supply. In order to produce corn ethanol, we must first grow an abundance of corn. Simple right? Wrong, corn is very draining on the soil it is grown, which, in short, means that whomever is growing the corn would have to rotate the corn plantation with something that will restore the nutrients of the soil. Unfortunately, that takes both time and money to do. The task would cal...
Significant changes in farming began to occur at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, tens of thousands of farmers surged westward to settle on the rich lands of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. [1]The...
Corn, or maize, is native to the Americas. It was was domesticated several thousand years ago and become a staple crop in pre-conquest mesoamerica. It was so central to the mesoamerican diet that it is thought to have made up about 80% of the calories consumed. The importance of maize is further exemplified by its role in mesoamerican cosmovision. The Maya and other mesoamerican cultures believed that humans were made by the gods out of corn.