In deference to the oligarch who built this rail line, Amtrak calls the train the Empire Builder, but nothing eastbound passengers see in the first few hours of high plains Montana looks even vaguely imperial. This is the extreme western edge of a farm country unimaginably vast, unpeopled, and monotonous. As I ride this train east toward Cutbank, Montana, forlorn hills of grass, still snowbound in mid-May of 1996, give way to flat land tiled alternately with fallow strips and stubble strips of wheat, and so begins a monoculture of wheat and wheat farmers that stretches almost unbroken seven, eight hundred miles east to Minnesota, and, in variations, south through Texas.
Farther east, the land shades to a monoculture of corn that fingers still farther east, into the Ohio River valley. To see its sweep is to believe that it has always been so, but it hasn’t, that it is a state of nature, but it isn’t. This false face on the land has emerged only during the past generation. In truth, it is the face of empire, but some two hundred–odd years of agrarian myth and a few more years of being barraged by Archer Daniels Midland’s non-commercials on National Public Radio and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer have blinded us to what we are seeing.
In any event, few Americans have really laid eyes on this place. Most of us register it from a comfortable, pressurized distance, as “flyover country,” that empty buffer between the nation’s bicoastal poles of power, the clean geometric patchwork that looks like order and well-being from thirty-five thousand feet. There is a truer and
more accessible image imprinted on every cereal box, Coke can, and candy wrapper, and echoed in those ubiquitous advertisements, in which an abstract of the landscape bleeds through the type: “You won’t see our name on any of these labels. But ADM is on every one … . Check the labels of the food you’re buying. Chances are you’ll see at least one ADM ingredient, such as citric acid, lactic acid, high fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, lecithin, xanthan gum, wheat gluten, soy protein, and vitamin C, to name a few.”
Any idea what this stuff is? It’s us. It’s the mass in our guts. It’s our heartland. It’s the molecules of our people and the juice of our politics, especially if you pay attention to the corn syrup.
I’m entering the story at one end, on a set of train tracks on the high plains, and you’re at the other, entering through a cereal box, or a fifteen-second feel-good spot on Meet the Press. Between us lies Archer Daniels Midland, conduit of food and images of food, with fifteen thousand owned railcars, two thousand barges, a hundred oceangoing vessels, and a leased network of five million trucks and five hundred thousand railcars moving wheat, corn, and soybeans to 269 processing plants. Woven amid the rails and pipes is an integral web of effectively owned and leased politicians and news organizations.
Archer Daniels is not alone in this picture; it is just the standard-bearer. Still, the list of food processors is not terribly long. Five companies—Cargill, Incorporated; Continental Grain Co. (recently renamed ContiGroup Companies); Louis Dreyfus; Andre & Cie; and the Bunge & Born Group—control about 75 percent of the corn market. Four companies—Archer Daniels; Cargill; Bunge; and Continental Grain—control about 80 percent of soybean processing, both in the United States and globally. A single co-op, Ag Processing Inc., accounts for another 5 to 10 percent in the United States.
According to Thomas Jefferson’s vision, this heartland was to be the anchor of national harmony, the centerpiece of a mythical agrarian identity antithetical to bicoastal poles of power. Jefferson imagined a democracy supported on the shoulders of yeomen settled as
equals in the West, saw these open places being filled with good country people. Lincoln pursued this vision with railroad land grants and the Homestead Act, which were designed to give us independence, settlement, and stability. Instead they gave us instability, depopulation, oligarchy, and poverty. All that I am seeing—the landscape from the train window, the rush and blur that ties it all together, the cereal boxes—is not the whole of farm country, but it is a big enough slice to make me consider why the heartland is anything but, why the region that was meant to build democracy is, all the way from here south into Texas and east to the Upper Midwest, a beaten place.
I have an idea that Jefferson was not altogether wrong, if only in that we can see the truth of his vision in its negative. Our failure in the plains is the measure of the failure of our nation as a whole, a notion I will take with me as I travel backward on the same railroad that carried Manifest Destiny forward, then south to Decatur, Illinois. Farming is a pyramid. At the pinnacle of that pyramid stands ADM, the nation’s largest buyer of grain, and at the pinnacle of ADM stands its flamboyant CEO, the empire builder Dwayne Andreas. He’s the wizard we’re off to see.
Sarah Vogel once got press because she was a lawyer for Ralph Clark, the right-wing nutcase who called himself a Freeman and staged an armed standoff with the FBI near Jordan, Montana. When I spoke with her, though, she didn’t want to talk about the Freemen; she spoke of North Dakota’s growing sweeter carrots than California. There is a connection nevertheless. Vogel is now North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner, but during the farm crisis of the 1980s she lawyered in the cause of helping farmers fend off federal foreclosures. Like many ranchers, Clark had joined the government-sponsored binge of easy money that sucked agrarians nationwide into overexpansion. Of course the bust came, and the antigovernment activist, like most of his ruggedly independent neighbors, tapped the dole. Over ten years, he pulled in $676,082 in federal farm subsidies for his 960-acre ranch, but the money did not prevent foreclosure.
Vogel’s father was a U.S. attorney during the fifties and sixties in the same stretch of plains. During his tenure, he handled three foreclosures on farms. During his daughter’s first month as ag commissioner in 1989, the feds alone pressed 2,400 foreclosure cases in roughly the same territory. This has come to be known as the farm crisis, but in reality, it was but a single crisis in a long series, a brief uptick in a hundred-year trend in American agriculture. Throughout the period, boom-and-bust cycles broke farmers, and the land accreted in the survivors’ hands. The survivors’ new power helped them retool a federal system created to support family farms into one favoring the few, a trend that actually predates the crisis.
Coincident with this was depopulation; the nation’s midsection has been unsettling in one long, unbroken curve. Population in the region peaked about the turn of the century. Nebraska now has as many as ten thousand deserted farmhouses. Kansas has six thousand ghost towns. Ninety percent of 450 rural plains counties lost population in the decade covered by the 2000 census, as they have in virtually every decade since the 1920s. The people who are left are poor. About 16 percent of residents live below the poverty line in Montana, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C. Montana’s people live in house trailers at more than double the national rate, a fact recorded in the ramshackle aluminum ring around every railroad town. We are at once the nation’s breadbasket and its basket case.
This trend may be a century old, but something critical shifted during the 1980s, something that explains why Vogel speaks first of carrots and why so many of the elevators full of wheat now bear the logo ADM. Andreas and the rest of industrial agriculture (but especially Andreas) advocate three things: exporting American agricultural products, keeping farmers on farms, and conserving topsoil. The 1980s farm crisis was precipitated by the first of these, a goal pursued at the expense of the other two.
From 1972 to 1981, American ag exports rose from $8 billion to $44 billion, mostly in corn and wheat. Much of this phenomenon can be traced to specific events, such as the USDA granting the Soviet Union $700 million in export credits in 1972, money the Soviets used to buy up a quarter of the U.S. wheat crop, which had the effect of
nearly quadrupling the price of wheat. Andreas was then, and still is, a strong advocate of offering export credits, specifically to the Soviet Union and its successors, probably because the credits funnel straight back to ADM, which sells, stores, and ships the grain. Andreas personally claims credit for convincing Richard Nixon to sell wheat to China. The USDA now refuses to disclose how much ADM has made on the Russian deal over the last twenty-five years, but clearly the effects have remade the American landscape.
As the export boom took off, farmers borrowed heavily in order to specialize in corn and wheat, abandoning all other crops, and, with them, the time-honored practice of crop rotation. Within a decade, the export boom had produced record farm failures and soil erosion of Dust Bowl proportions. The boom caused overproduction; prices fell; interest rates rose; and international markets collapsed. Between 1970 and 1992, a million farms—36 percent of all American farms—ceased to exist. “Farmers are the most indispensable people on the planet,” crows an ADM ad. Yet coincident with the rise of this corporation’s fortunes has been an unprecedented decline in the number of American farmers.
Along the rail line, North Dakota is such an implacable sea of wheat as to suggest permanence, but these fields were once host to a diverse array of crops. The export boom hardened agriculture’s monomania and the government bailout following the farm crisis tempered that edge. The government was hooked on using corn and wheat to balance trade, and structured subsidies to encourage those two commodities at the expense of almost all other crops.
Meanwhile, at the height of the farm crisis, the government abolished ceilings for key subsidized loan programs. Suddenly, there was a pool of bankrupt farmers, cheap foreclosed land and machinery, and subsidized capital—plus a government willing to guarantee income available to those willing to farm big. Today the richest 2 percent of all farmers—2 percent of 1.6 percent of the nation’s population—account for 35 percent of total farm sales. At the same time, they receive 27 percent of federal subsidies. As many as 76 percent of the farms in some Colorado counties would lose money were it not for subsidies. Montana would have no net farm income—zero—without subsidies. Half of the total federal income taxes paid by all North Dakota residents returns to the state as farm subsidies, yet only 9.5 percent of the residents of the state, the nation’s second most rural, live on farms. This is a welfare state.
The predominant system of farming bolstered by all of this is accurately named industrial agriculture. It is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive, which largely explains the region’s depopulation. Industrial agriculture considers the countryside as a factory. Capital buys machinery and “inputs” like fertilizer and pesticides. Farmers are, more appropriately, regarded as conduits, not recipients, of federal money, to the point that chemical suppliers, machinery manufacturers, and bankers have become the staunchest backers of the farm subsidy program. The output is corn and wheat, now in surplus, and in surplus virtually every year since the plains first saw a plow, in part because the subsidy system has encouraged surplus. These crops cannot be sold like a carrot can, directly to a consumer, but must be sold to processors like ADM. To a buyer, especially a mega-buyer, surplus means cheap.
In 1878, when John Daniels was crushing flaxseed to produce linseed oil, processing was a fringe activity to farming. It still was in 1903, when a fellow linseed crusher, George Archer, joined the company. As it was in 1923, when the partners bought out a third linseed crusher, Midland Linseed Products. In the 1930s, after fifty-five years as a linseed company, ADM started milling flour, then processing soybeans, and finally expanded with the U.S. economy into overseas production in the 1950s. Dwayne Andreas, formerly an executive for another agribusiness giant, Cargill, took over in 1966 and held the reins until his retirement from the board in 2001.
When Andreas assumed control, ADM began a rapid expansion, from simply dealing grain to a broad range of food processing. This mirrored developments on the farm. As ADM diversified, farmers specialized, the better to feed ADM. Singlehandedly, the company buys about 12 percent of the nation’s corn crop. It can store more
grain than any other company in the world, and is the nation’s largest miller of wet corn, processor of soybeans, and sheller of peanuts, and the second-largest flour miller. Out the other end of its pipe come flours, an array of vegetable oils, soy burgers, corn sweeteners, sugar, feed and feed additives, vitamins, vodka, and a seemingly endless list of additives for processed foods. To quote a business analysts’ profile: “The agri-giant continues to grow by creating new products from, and new products for, its core corn, grain, and vegetable processing business.”
ADM doesn’t deal in food, it deals in commodities; thus it is wholly dependent on the system of federal subsidies that has converted American agriculture to one big commodity factory. In 1950, farmers grossed forty-one cents of every consumer’s food dollar; that figure fell to twenty-one cents by 1994, simply because we eat more processed commodities. The 1994 figure of twenty-one cents, however, is an average. Even today, a farmer gets fifty-eight cents of a consumer’s dollar spent on eggs, because an egg is food. A chicken makes it; a farmer puts it in a carton and sells it. When a corn farmer sells his crop to ADM, he gets four cents of the consumer dollar spent on corn syrup.
This observation is at the heart of an extraordinarily angry book, Victor Davis Hanson’s Fields Without Dreams. Hanson, a failed raisin farmer in California’s Central Valley, describes a mansion being built by a raisin buyer as all the farms around him are failing. The buyer “admitted in a rare moment of candor that you can make money in agriculture if you don’t grow food.”
A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.
Vogel talks about carrots because she is in North Dakota, the current leader in developing a cooperative marketing system for farmers. The state is alone in consciously trying to shake off monoculture through diversification and control of marketing. The largest of the
new co-ops, Northern Plains Premium Beef, has 2,700 member ranchers in five states and two Canadian provinces. It’s trying to circumvent the four beef packers that buy 85 percent of the state’s beef. Wheat farmers have banded together to build a pasta factory at Carrington that employs two hundred people. There is an oil seed cooperative, an organic marketing co-op, and a co-op for bison meat.
These groups are among those trying to reintroduce a distinction between commodities and food, the latter being something people eat, like a carrot, and the former being something that a manufacturer like ADM buys and processes into products resembling food. The distinction between food and commodity says much about what we eat, but bears equally on the integrity of a farmer’s work.
“hen you’re raising wheat and dumping it at an elevator, what difference does it make?” says John Gardner, who runs ag research at North Dakota State University. “ut if you’re raising pasta, it’s food. You eat it. And all of a sudden it becomes a different thing. How you raise it, fertilize it, what pesticides you use—all of a sudden it becomes a whole different thing when it’s food and not a commodity.”
The distinction also dictates separate paths through the market, which is why Vogel worries about whether her state’s carrots are sweet. The farmer puts the value in food, and its inherent quality recommends it to consumers. Commodities, however, leave the farm as an amorphous lump of grain. Processors make them into something like food, and packaging and advertising convince us it has value.
Corn, the nation’s biggest crop, is mostly absent on the high plains; it can grow only to the east and south, where soils are thicker and summers hotter. But at Fargo, North Dakota’s largest city and eastern edge, I leave the train for a day and drive a highway threaded through the absurdly black soil of corn’s northwest frontier. On the radio, one of NPR’s non-commercials lauds “Archer Daniels Midland, producers of lysine, an amino acid which promotes the growth of poultry and swine.” (Based on an FBI investigation in the 1990s, ADM was convicted of fixing the price of lysine.) Beside the road, a
billboard for Dakota Dinosaur Museum says: “You’re on the Road to Extinction.”
In fact, I am on the road to the three-thousand-acre organic farm Fred Kirschenmann has run since 1976. His parents settled the land in the 1930s, and his father was among the first farmers in the fifties to begin specializing and pouring on chemicals. In the late sixties, his father began to see something very wrong with the health of his land. Eight years later, after Fred finished his Ph.D. in religion, started teaching, and got ordained, he found himself “fed up with urban life.” He returned to the farm, ready to try organic agriculture. His father said fine, do whatever works, and work it has.
“Not to be hokey, but I feel called by what I am doing,” Fred says.
I bring up Clark and the Freemen. Kirschenmann mentions Gordon Kahl and Posse Comitatus, another homegrown band of agriterrorists spawned by farm failures. In 1983, Kahl killed two U.S. marshalls at nearby Medina, then another lawman before he was killed after a cross-country chase. Good yeomen farmers hid him from the feds throughout. Posse Comitatus, Freemen, John Birch, militias, Aryans, Patriots—the plains seem to spawn a litany of such stories.
“We’re dealing with a much bigger issue here: the extent to which we still have a democracy,” he says.
Kirschenmann’s neighbors grow wheat and (the lucky ones) corn and soybeans. Period. Kirschenmann grows oats, wheat, rye, barley, millet, buckwheat, alfalfa, flax, sweet clover, lentils, and sunflowers. He raises beef cattle, a practice virtually all of his neighbors have abandoned. There’s not a lot of money in cattle, but they eat mostly his crop waste, and they produce manure. He sells them at an organic-market premium, as he does most of his crops, sometimes in Europe because organic markets are stronger there, and bread bakers still use millet and buckwheat.
Kirschenmann believes humans fell from grace ten thousand years ago, the fall a sin of pride that came from domesticating plants. Since then, all of agriculture has been an attempt to enforce distance from nature. By contrast, natural systems are diverse and feed themselves in cycles of growth and decay, and Kirschenmann makes a
profit by reentering these cycles, because he doesn’t buy fertilizer. He grows it; and he can sell high by selling food for which consumers will pay a premium price.
Buckwheat, beer, and a gong illuminate for me Kirschenmann’s notion of harmony. We bounce along, jammed in the cab of his behemoth tractor on a bitterly cold morning. Water is standing in his fields, because of the strange, cold spring. He shows me a flooded plot that should be planted to wheat by now. His neighbors in the same situation will be down at the disaster office claiming crop loss and federal checks. Kirschenmann will get no federal check. He will simply wait for the weather to warm, at which point it will be too late to plant wheat but in plenty of time for warm-season crops like buckwheat.
As an organic farmer, Kirschenmann practices a subset of sustainable agriculture. Organic growers eschew all chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Sustainable ag can use chemicals, although it tries to limit them; but both schools believe in rotating crops, incorporating livestock into crop production, and integrating systems of managing pests, markets, and nutrient cycles. The antithesis is industrial ag. Nevertheless, in some of its advertising, ADM tries to nudge at least its image into the sustainable-ag column by backing a practice called “no-till,” which does away with plowing and other forms of tillage. What no-till tends to mean in practice, however, is that weeds are controlled by herbicides instead of cultivation; so organic farmers mostly avoid no-till, not to mention ADM.
Not to mention subsidies. North Dakota’s agricultural officials conducted a study that found that both sustainable and industrial ag can be profitable. The primary source of income for both was sale of crops, but the second most important source for sustainable ag was sale of livestock; for their more “efficient” counterparts, the second most important source of income was government payments. Narrowed to one or two crops, factory farming is rigid. There are no options for rolling with nature’s inevitable punches. Federal subsidies cushion that rigidity.
Kirschenmann says the best thing that can happen to a farmer like him is the proliferation of brew pubs, a movement that has
spread even to towns like Fargo. He can contract with the microbrewery to raise brewing grains, sell them at a premium, and then sit with his neighbors on a Saturday night in a place where people make good beer. This is how markets build community instead of destroying it. We once came together over food, before it came from commodities.
Carolyn Raffensperger, Kirschenmann’s wife, sounds a gong, then there is a moment of silence before we begin a dinner of their farm’s beef. The quiet is complete on the prairie in Kirschenmann’s earth-sheltered house. Out front an unpolluted slough full of ruddy ducks settles with the sunset.
ADM’s corn is field corn (also called grain corn), not the kind that comes in cans or is eaten on the cob or popped. It is the hyper-hybrid descendant of the corn first domesticated in Mexico. For a long time its ancestor was eaten as food, and it still is in some remote villages, but not for much longer. As a result of NAFTA, the export of industrial ag to Mexico has greatly accelerated, a fact that has alarmed botanists. The typical Mexican corn farmer using traditional methods raises forty varieties of corn, and this gene pool is in danger. Like farming, corn itself has been narrowed until it no longer produces a food, a loss that is cultural as well. Those forty varieties each have separate uses, seasons, customs, recipes, and celebrations; the basis of culture.
Even the World Bank says NAFTA will drive as many as 300,000 Mexican farmers from simple but workable lives in the countryside to marginal lives in cities. In various guises, this same political-economic force is driving a worldwide urban crisis: Third World countries have seen a fivefold increase in their urban populations between 1950 and 1990. Virtually all of these refugees assume lives of the worst sort of poverty, and much of the blame can be laid on American grain. ADM stores and brokers much of the grain the United States dumps on Third World countries. Andreas was standing in the room when part of the law enabling this dumping was written. In 1978, ADM paid a $200,000 fine after pleading no contest to
price-fixing in the Food for Peace Program. Between 1985 and 1995, ADM had received more than $130 million in export subsidies through the USDA.
U.S. grain, free or otherwise, puts Third World farmers out of business, sacking local agriculture and local markets. Case studies going back to the 1950s demonstrate this in India, Peru, Egypt, Somalia, Senegal, and Haiti. This is one way in which we pay to hide the surplus that we have paid our farmers to produce.
The most troubling surplus in all of this, however, is people—those who have moved off the land to the ring of house trailers around plains towns, or to sprawling slums in the cities of America and other countries. We justify our agricultural system by saying it feeds people, but how is it that we still can’t answer the more fundamental question as formulated by the farmer and poet Wendell Berry? If the system can only work by making people redundant, then what are people for? he asks in an essay that bears that question as its title.
This question does not worry Hiram Drache, not even a little bit. Drache is an agricultural historian and an unabashed proponent of industrial agriculture. Vogel and Kirschenmann are subculture; Drache speaks for the mainstream. Literacy—ADM hires him to lecture. To the outsider still holding a misty-eyed image of the American farmer, the cover of Drache’s most recent book, Legacy of the Land, is antidote. The book cover shows an enormous, monochromatic and depopulated rural landscape, broken only by a metal-sided factory.
An engaging old man in standard northern-tier, Lutheran-issue blazer and tie, he holds forth from a warren of an office at Concordia College, in Moorehead, Minnesota, where he taught before retiring. He reminds me early in our discussion that there are now two counties in North Dakota whose county seats hold fewer than thirty-five people. He says this represents an “opportunity.”
“I think we could be closing down a lot of county courthouses,” he says. “With the computers we could send out the checks.”
He believes computers will do most of the work of farmers, from satellite-based mapping of fields, to calculating and fine-tuning seed
genetics and fertilizer doses (a capability already in use), to completely mechanized handling and packaging. The advent of this technology has been duly announced in a warm and fuzzy ADM ad that revolves around a conversation between a farmer-father and his farmer-son. Neither mentions that this technology is another nail in the coffin of the family farm.
Peter Bloome was assistant director of the Illinois Cooperative Extension Service when I interviewed him, and is now at a similar post in Oregon. An outgrowth of the Land Grant College system established by Lincoln, the extension services have been roundly castigated in recent years as shills for industrial ag. Bloome and others agree the charge fits, but the excesses of industrial ag have caused some defections, Bloome among them.
He says these high-tech systems generally are used by buyers such as ADM who contract with farmers to grow a specific crop, then use the technology to micromanage the farm. Control over decisions passes from farmer to contract buyer; the information moves to behind the wizard’s curtain, leaving the farmer to serve as conduit and front man for lobbyists.
Industrial ag displaces people. Drache says North Dakota has a future dictated by the Wal-Mart philosophy—i.e., any town big enough to have a Wal-Mart will survive. The death of the rest he sees as no loss. Recalls Drache: “Once at a conference I heard a young woman say every small community that wants to should be allowed to continue … . I got up and said, ‘I don’t know when you have been in rural America last, but I have been through town after town after town where … I’ve said, Thank god I don’t have to live there.’”
If you think him wrong on this count, you haven’t been in rural America recently either.
The Empire Builder winds its way south from Fargo to the Twin Cities, both urban, polite, progressive, and clean. Yet in the Birkenstock quarter of St. Paul, in front of latte stands and bookstores, earnest young women in print dresses distribute leaflets denouncing hog factories. In Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri, and
especially North Carolina, the big sty state, public policy discussions have turned to hog factories. Said one Missourian of her state, “There are two hot issues: abortion and hogs.”
We hide grain surpluses in foreign aid, but the more traditional way of hiding corn is in livestock. The first cattle drives just after the Civil War brought longhorns from Texas to the Midwest, where they were fattened up on a surplus of corn that has existed in virtually every year since. Thus began the habit that produces the fat meat at the heart of the nation’s 700,000 annual premature deaths from coronary disease. It is nothing more than a habit; we can produce perfectly good (and better for you) grass-fed beef without corn, but worldwide two-thirds of the corn crop is fed to livestock, increasingly in the United States to swine. Grazers like cattle and bison could do a better job of producing our protein on natural grass systems, which, unlike plowed fields, can be sustainable. Hogs can’t graze, but we and the landscape would be a lot better off if there were a lot fewer of them in our food chain.
The new wave in hog farming, what many believe to be the new wave in farming itself, began in North Carolina but logically spread to the corn/lysine belt. Corporations founded mega–hog factories holding twenty thousand to a hundred thousand animals. A single county in North Carolina holds more than a million hogs; they outnumber residents twenty-five to one. In Missouri, one county holds 1.5 million.
This trend is emblematic of the future of agriculture for three reasons. First, it is filthy. As noted, the average pig’s gut produces about three times the waste of the average human. That county in Missouri with 1.5 million hogs warehoused in a few buildings finds itself with a sewage-treatment problem the equal of a city of five million people, but none of its waste is treated as sewage. Regulators now discuss hog farms in terms of “cleanup,” a phrase once reserved for toxic waste sites, and they use this term with cause. In 1995, twenty-five million gallons of liquefied hog shit busted a lagoon and spilled into North Carolina’s New River, wiping out seventeen miles of aquatic life. At least 88,000 fish died in a similar spill in Missouri, one of seven in the summer of 1995. Such spills are part of the
record in Iowa and Minnesota, but those are the accidents. Even if all goes well, residents of communities that draw hog factories first get to live a few years with an unmentionable stench, then they get to leave.
Second, it is oligarchic. Small owner-operated hog farms can produce pork for about the same price as hog factories, pound for pound, but the larger operations can draw venture capital and negotiate better contracts with meatpackers. In the last twenty years, the number of hog farmers in the nation has declined by 68 percent, close to a half-million farmers put out of business by corporate farming. Now 4.8 percent of the producers turn out 43 percent of the nation’s pork.
Third, the industry is a parasite, an outgrowth wholly dependent on corn made cheap by federal subsidy and on corn and soybean derivatives sold by ADM and its ilk. In nature, the creation of an enormous untapped biomass will surely lead to the evolution of creatures sufficiently large and adaptable to feed on it. The principle applies both to hog factories and to ADM.
The train rolls out of the Twin Cities, south to Chicago, and then a new train continues south from there into what was once tall grass prairie, now wholly surrendered to soybeans and the domestic tall grass, corn. The landscape here is different from high-plains wheat country. Here the towns are neater and closer together. You see picket fences. There’s more money in corn. It is not so much food as it is a raw material (only about 7 percent of the crop is used in cereals and other corn foods like tortillas), and still it is our most lucrative crop. I leave the train and drive a few miles away from the main line, the last few miles across ground zero of American agriculture. This, too, is a filthy place.
A farmer here tells me his placid rural life means his wife will not drink well water when she is pregnant. In Decatur, the Health Department sometimes issues bottled drinking water for infants. Corn is grown with nitrogen fertilizer. In central Illinois and throughout the corn belt, many of the surface water supplies (including Lake
Decatur, which is in sight of ADM’s headquarters) and some of the groundwater supplies have unacceptably high concentrations of nitrates from fertilizer runoff. Nitrates cause methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby syndrome,” which can be (and has been) fatal. The floods of 1993 flushed so much nitrogen from the Mississippi Valley that it created an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico, a raft of gunk that turned out to be an ideal breeding ground for disease. As the raft floated up the East Coast, it spread a mutated virus that killed dolphins, beluga whales, Atlantic harbor seals, and porpoises as far north as the St. Laurence Seaway. A similar event occurred in the nitrogen-fouled North Sea a few years before.
Virtually every stream in Illinois is contaminated with the four herbicides used to grow corn and soybeans, some above federal standards. An official of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency says the situation is bad enough to warrant “enforcement action.” Does this mean the state stops the corn farmers from putting pesticides in the water?
“Oh, no, that wouldn’t be practical,” he says.
It means the state makes communities find a new source of drinking water.
The corruption of life, however, is not simply local. Once we hid our corn surplus in livestock and impoverished foreigners, but our ability to produce corn has outrun the supply of these. What the situation required was a new idea that would treat all of us like livestock.
ADM makes most of its corn into syrup. Nationally, about 42 percent of the processed corn goes to sweeteners, something almost no one ever buys directly but which most everyone eats. Just read the label on most any processed food, especially “fruit juices.” Look for “high fructose corn syrup” as the second ingredient, right behind water. It’s in scalloped potatoes, barbecue sauce, salad dressing, ketchup, oatmeal cookies, Wheat Thins, Campbell’s Chunky Soup, granola bars, canned fruit, SpaghettiOs, ice cream, and virtually every carbonated soft drink.
This ubiquitous “food” has spawned a wave of obesity in the
United States, a trend directly tied to decisions made in Decatur. To quote Barron’s:
In the late Seventies and early Eighties, ADM gambled that fructose corn syrup would eventually supplant sugar as the sweetener of choice for the soft-drink bottling industry. To overcome bottler resistance however, ADM had to constantly add new capacity in already glutted syrup markets … . The displacement of sucrose took place in agonizing stages. But ADM emerged the big winner, leaving rivals such as CPC International and American Maize in the dust.
As the freeway nears Decatur from the east, an audible “Jesus” resonates through the rental car. Then I realize it came from me and was provoked by my first glimpse of the panorama to the south—a horizon of steam vents, smokestacks, pipe, and steel. This is the Emerald City, the center of ADM. Here’s where it’s done, the processing, both seen and unseen, of politicians as well as of commodities.
Sugar, pure cane sugar, costs about twelve cents a pound on the world market, but twice that in the United States because of protective quotas set in a 1981 sugar bill heavily lobbied for in an effort funded by ADM. The cost of corn syrup hovers about halfway between world sugar and protected domestic sugar, a price differential designed to “overcome bottler resistance, a reluctance, it turns out, solely based on price.” In 1996, when Congress supposedly revolutionized farm policy in a new farm bill, sugar was again controversial, but the provisions affecting that commodity survived virtually unchanged from previous legislation. The beauty of this, from ADM’s point of view, is that the company’s efforts leave no fingerprints. No money goes directly to ADM; it goes to sugar farmers. A congressional report summarizing lobbying on the 1996 bill doesn’t even mention ADM’s role (nor did an exposé of the sugar lobby on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer); but, then, as The New York Times pointed out, “Archer-Daniels does not have a lobbyist in Washington;
it really does not need one.” Still it gets one simple law that is the necessary and sufficient cause of making saleable corn syrup, the product that alone accounts for more than a third of ADM’s profits, the single biggest contributor to its net gain. Meanwhile, this quota costs a family of four about sixty dollars a year in higher prices.
Corn syrup’s price, however, may not be an altogether organic artifact of the market that quotas have artificially sweetened. At least that’s the suspicion that drove an FBI investigation in the 1990s into allegations made by Mark Whitacre, a former ADM executive turned whistle-blower. ADM, along with competitors, controls about 83 percent of the coru-sweetener market, and Whitacre alleged that ADM conspired with foreign companies to set the price. Whitacre, however, lost his immunity from prosecution and his credibility when he was found to have bilked ADM out of $9 million. ADM did plead guilty to two charges of price-fixing related to those allegations and paid $100 million in penalties. Both Whitacre and Michael Andreas, Dwayne’s heir apparent, did prison time.
Some of the smokestacks on the horizon mark the production of ethanol, of which ADM is the nation’s largest purveyor. Ethanol is an interesting substance—an alcohol distilled from corn, but as much a distillation of politics. Promoted as an alternative motor fuel for a century, it is enjoying a recent boost in its political octane.
Because it derives from corn, ethanol production requires the energy and petrochemicals that feed tractors, transport trucks, and distilleries directly, and fertilizers indirectly. In fact, several studies that have examined the issue conclude that the production of ethanol consumes more energy than it yields. The more optimistic appraisals find a net gain only when the value of co-products such as corn oil are taken into account, and even then a unit of energy is consumed for every 1.24 units of ethanol energy produced. The most favorable says it takes about 1.3 units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. This real-world mathematical deficit must be papered over with subsidy. Every dollar of profit ADM makes on ethanol costs American taxpayers eleven dollars.
If there were a contents-labeling law for politicians, corn money would be listed as the first ingredient. When Bob Dole represented Kansas in the U.S. Senate, he sponsored fifty bills supporting ethanol. The New York Times called Dole “ADM’s staunchest ally on Capitol Hill.” Noted the Wall Street Journal: “In the Senate, Mr. Dole has been the chief promoter of the ethanol subsidy.”
Dole is the most notable beneficiary of the four million dollars ADM, Andreas, and family members have contributed to various political candidates over the past couple of decades. He has flown on ADM aircraft at least twenty-nine times since 1993. ADM sponsored Dole’s commentaries broadcast over the Mutual Radio Network. Dole bought an apartment from Andreas in Florida in 1982 at less than market value. After Elizabeth Dole became the head of the Red Cross, Andreas’s nonprofit foundation gave one million dollars to it.
About the same time that then-president George Bush proposed standards favoring ethanol, he received a $400,000 check from ADM. In 1994, Bill Clinton got a $100,000 check. Andreas himself organized a fund-raiser that netted the 1992 Clinton campaign $3.5 million, but at least this seems more refined than Andreas’s earlier political adventures. In 1972, he walked into the Nixon White House bearing an unmarked envelope containing a hundred thousand-dollar bills. He ensured his place in history by writing the check that tied the Watergate burglars to the Nixon campaign. In 1992, Andreas-related checks were the top money source for the Republicans, and the third-highest for the Democrats.
Days after receiving the $100,000, Clinton ordered that ethanol be added to 30 percent of the gasoline in the nation’s nine most polluted cities, despite information from within his own administration that showed gasohol causes new pollution problems. This proved to be a repeatable pattern. ADM was a leading donor to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000, a favor later repaid when one of the first acts of his administration was to refuse to grant California a waiver to rules requiring oxygenated gasoline. California argued it could meet federal clean-air standards without additives to gasoline, of which there are two. The state had already banned one of those, methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), on the grounds that it posed health hazards,
leaving only one alternative: ethanol. The ban on MTBE, however, became suspect when The Wall Street Journal reported that California governor Gray Davis met with ADM officials and took a $135,000 campaign contribution from Martin Andreas, a member of ADM’s controlling family, before announcing the ban.
A longtime Decatur resident tells me that as a kid he loved corn bread, but he can no longer eat it, or anything else with corn or corn syrup in it. Like many hereabout, he has developed allergies as a result of the high concentrations of corn pollen in the air. The corn-pollen index appears on the local news during the growing season. He also tells me there are no hotels in downtown Decatur; like much of the Midwest, it has surrendered to chain-strip sprawl. Besides, the town stinks of cooking corn mash. And he tells me that ADM, a multinational with $12.6 billion in annual sales, has a public relations department of one person, and if he won’t talk, there will be no talking.
I check into a chain motel and call ADM’s lone-ranger PR department to ask for a tour. (I figure cornering Andreas is out of the question and have no desire to participate in a corn-belt remake of Roger and Me.) A secretary answers. No, he’s out. I identify myself and lodge my request.
“Perhaps Martin Andreas will speak with you,” she says. She’ll check and get back with me. Sure. Martin is a senior vice-president in a flowchart liberally seeded with the Andreases.
I leave my room for half an hour and return to a message. “Andreas called,” it says. I call the main switchboard and say only that I am returning Martin Andreas’s call.
“I’ll get you his office.”
A secretary answers. I identify myself. She says he will speak with me right now. Then a voice snarls, “Andreas.”
“Martin Andreas?”
“No. Dwayne Andreas.”
And, yes, Dwayne, recently beaten in the press in the wake of the price-fixing scandals, and just as recently denying interviews, says
he will grant one. What is an interview going to be like with the legendary CEO, bagman for the Nixon White House, and seventy-eight-year-old autocrat with a sufficiently hands-on approach to the corporation that he is only a call removed from the main switchboard?
“I’ll tell you, he’s a hell of a guy,” says Emmett Sefton. “I guarantee you he’ll have a nice suit on and you won’t put anything over on him.”
Sefton himself is a hell of a guy, a straightforward industrial-ag, corn-and-soybeans farmer who spent five years on the American Soybean Board. I speak with him in the neat, modest farmhouse on his thousand-acre farm a few miles from Decatur. He’s reasoned and thoughtful about industrial ag, pensive even when he talks about farming being a lot less work and a lot more stress than it was a generation ago when he grew up on farms that still practiced crop rotation and had livestock. And, yes, it’s common to hear that farmers don’t want their kids going into farming, but one of his sons has decided to anyway. He talks about what he has done to better manage chemicals. (He once accidentally dumped a gallon of pesticide into his face.)
Sefton sees Andreas as the point man of industrial ag, the champion of farmers, and he’s glad the patron wears a nice suit. He is the conduit to the international markets and the grease in the political system that makes the mountain of corn and soybeans disappear. Andreas has taught his protectorate some lessons about what he calls “tithing.”
“I donate to both parties,” says the commodity farmer who estimates that 15 percent of his income, as much as 40 percent in some years, comes from direct federal payments. “Any politician needs help, whether he requests it or not.”
“If we didn’t do something to move our product, we’d be in a hell of a shape today,” he says. “I’m tickled to death ADM is where they’re at. I can see their smoke every morning.”
The stacks represent a simple system for Sefton and all corn growers. He raises a crop, often under direct contract to ADM. He loads it on a truck or train and ships it straight to an ADM elevator. A
check comes. If the price is not large enough to ensure his profit, a second check comes from the government to make up the difference, guaranteeing that his corn will be there—and be there cheap—in years to come.
ADM has messengered me a five-pound press kit, and in it is an Andreas quote, something he once said in advance of an appearance before a group of Boston financial analysts: “Getting information from me is like frisking a seal.”
There’s a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan in the parking lot in front of the blocky, utilitarian office building centered in the sprawl of steam and stacks, but ADM’s iconography is at least ecumenical. The 1995 annual report features a picture of John F. Kennedy on the cover, complete with the “Ask not …” quote. (The same document reports a net profit of $795 million; ADM has not suffered unduly in our nation’s service.) Dwight Eisenhower gets prominent play inside, and, just to cover all bases, a particularly pithy quote is set in the shape of a cross.
On the top floor is the hushed, wood-paneled, memento-filled office of Dwayne Andreas. From what I know of suits, his is okay. His answers are rote, and he seems to pull them from someplace off in the middle distance. He’s a little guy, and he seems tired.
“The free market is a myth. Everybody knows that. Just very few people say it. If you’re in the position like I am and do business all over the world, and if I’m not smart enough to know there’s no free market, I ought to be fired.
“The reason we don’t call it socialism is that socialism is a bad word.”
A bad word especially to Republican politicians who fuel their crusades for the free market on Andreas cash. Andreas tells me this is not about ideology.
“I don’t talk to politicians about my business. Ever. I systematically avoid that,” he says.
Then you just give them money? No strings?
“I never give money to politicians.”
You don’t?
“No. I respond. We have people all over the company that respond
to fund-raisers. We have businesses in three hundred locations, so naturally we get drawn into supporting various political candidates. But I do not deal with political candidates at all.”
You don’t?
“No. I never discuss my business with them and never make any contributions to them … . There is no connection between campaign contributions and political activity … . Who doesn’t respond to their favorite politician? If you’re any kind of a citizen you respond. Otherwise how the hell would you have a democracy? The poor devils can’t run for an election unless they can at least buy a poster. Let alone television.”
But Sefton says you’re important in politics because you are the farmers’ advocate.
“I don’t have to be an advocate of anything. If you’re in the business you have to be an observer. I observe what is happening. I don’t have to advocate one way or the other. And besides, what difference would it make if I advocated or didn’t advocate?”
Some of the politicians Andreas doesn’t talk to and doesn’t give money to have passed a new farm bill with the stated intention of ending federal farm subsidies in seven years. They were emboldened in this endeavor by the fact that commodity prices are at the apogee of their orbit, and farmers don’t need the subsidy just now. Does Dwayne Andreas think for a second that farmers will remain unsubsidized when prices fall, as they surely will?
“No.”
Which is precisely the unequivocal answer that Sefton and every other farmer and farm expert has given me to that question during two months of interviews.
“You can’t have farming on a total laissez-faire system because the sellers are too weak and the buyers are too strong,” says the world’s strongest buyer.
What about the co-ops springing up in North Dakota and elsewhere? Might they make the sellers strong enough to stand up to ADM?
“Co-ops own more than twenty percent of our company. Overseas co-ops own half. A million or more farmers are either partners or
shareholders in ADM. We’re really an extension of the farm. It’s all one great big machine,” he says.
North of Decatur, up on the freeway exit strip, I pull into Applebee’s, or some other cookie-cutter “neighborhood” restaurant. Does it really matter which one? This is the corporate clutter novelist Tom McGuane calls “the escalating boredom of the monoculture.” The waitress extrudes from her Gap khakis in a way that detractors of midwesterners once called “corn-fed,” only now it is a better joke. We all are corn-fed, because we all eat identical products off identical trucks at identical strip malls, coast to coast. I order my slice of the collective pie and finally get the ADM slogan, “Supermarket to the World.” Not supermarket as in Safeway. After all, ADM doesn’t sell anything directly to consumers. It doesn’t even advertise in the traditional hardball, product-pushing sense (although there are all those sponsorships, euphemistically called “underwriting,” of political talk shows and public-broadcasting news programs).
It’s “super” as in über, as in “above all.” Above all markets and above all people.
The interview with Andreas has been a failure, although by the two current standards of journalism, not really. One standard approach is simply to ignore ADM and the pernicious effects of corporations on American agriculture, an effect particularly pronounced at National Public Radio and on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, both of which enjoy ADM “underwriting” and run corporate-ID statements that look and sound like straight-ahead commercials. (Control over media, however, can be even more direct. In 1994, Andreas bought $9.5 million worth of American Publishing Co., owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and 340 other newspapers.)
The second, more prevalent, approach is the “gotcha.” This entails compiling a laundry list of misdeeds (like Andreas’s role as Watergate bagman, ADM’s antitrust violations, the FBI investigations, and the like), confronting the man himself, and then dancing around the denials. Like the food in this place, it is shit—processed entertainment at best, that gives the illusion of reporters having done their
jobs by policing the rare cases of excessive behavior. The miscreants (defined as those who speak their intentions outside of their private clubs) have been dealt with, and all is well.
The thing is, I want it all. I want to unroll that social landscape from the Rockies to the Ohio River valley, the dream of hard work and honesty it was, and the oligarchy it is now. I want to replay every blank fat face staring at every blank plate in this place and say, “Mr. Andreas, how did we get like this?” The thing is, I think he knows.
A longtime observer of agriculture told me, “You’d have to stand in line to hate ADM,” but standing in that line would be a mistake. ADM, thanks especially to Andreas, is a lightning rod. He is nineteenth-century enough to advertise his empire-building. He buys his politicians at public auction—all the better for Cargill, ConAgra, General Food, Borden, Continental Grain, CPC, Aji-nomoto, American Maize, A. E. Staley, and the rest who buy silently.
Gayle Goold, a corn farmer, a sustainable ag man, tells me there’s a big problem in Illinois, that a corn worm has learned the evolutionary trick of laying its eggs in soybeans, thereby defeating crop rotation. That’s a parasite’s job, to look for a big, untapped pile of biomass and then evolve to tap it. Andreas has told me a true thing. His job is to observe, to respond, to evolve, to co-opt the co-ops, to morph, to feed on a decaying system.
I ask Goold what the rest of us, the 98.4 percent, can do about this, and he says, “Grow a tomato.”
Our people have no idea what real food tastes like. The effect of real tomatoes on the American public could very well work like (and now I can only imagine) a taste of integrity from our politics. Quality is subversive. The farmer is saying: We are what you eat.