Corn: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns corn we love it in all of its forms from caramel corn to the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the mascot of the Nebraska Corn Huskers except not the modern travesty I'm talking about the early one no not that demon the original yeah that's him the guy in regular clothes with an enormous corn cop for a head asking the question am I man or am I corn we love corn so much we've even found a way to make it a wholesome family activity this Illinois Corn Maze is rural sprawl 28

acres in all with almost 10 mil of trails we said if we're going to do it why not be the world's largest the theme changes every year that great aerial photograph we want people to go wow that's a magnificent picture our Beatles maze in in 2013 I mean you could see the faces of The Beatles fifth graders zigzagging through a corn maze thinking we got to find a way out or this field trip could be our last wow that got dark quick although I think even the Beatles would agree there is just no better tribute

to their legacy than having terrified children wander around Ringo's nostrils wondering if they'll ever see their families again and because of how much we love corn appealing to the Corn Growers of America has always been good politics presidential contenders love to Pander to people in Iowa from Obama standing in front of a corn field to Mitt Romney pretending to be intently interested in an ear of corn to whatever George Bush thought he was doing here there is a long history of American politicians being weird around corn but perhaps no one has ever been weirder while

discussing it than this I just met non-liquid gold you know where it was Iowa it's called corn they have it's non liquid that's my day you have more non Liquid Gold they said what is that I said corn they said we love that idea you know that's pretty cool thought isn't it that's a nickname in its own way but we came up with a new word for new couple of words for corn yeah did you though because non-liquid gold isn't so much a way of describing corn as it is a way of describing regular gold

that's a level of non- innovation Innovation that we haven't seen since Lyft invented something called lift shuttle which was and this is true the bus but he is right we are the world's largest producer consumer and exporter of non-liquid not gold in the world we also produce more corn than any other crop in the US farming it is a nearly 90 billion industry with Farmers planting roughly 90 million Acres a year and in case you're like me and don't really understand what an acre is it might help to know that cornfields currently occupy nearly 5%

of the land surface of the contiguous United States and you might already be thinking well so what that means that America's well stocked for the movies barbecues and House parties where someone wants that Black Bean Salsa thing why do you have to ruin a good thing to which I say one it's a calling and a Clarity of purpose and two of those millions of acres of corn only 1% is made for direct human consumption the rest is called field or Dent corn which as these documentaries discovered might look delicious but very much isn't it's not

very good tastes like s yeah it's disgusting it tastes like chalk I really thought it would taste better yeah it turns out sweet corn is as similar to Dent corn as a chocolate bunny is to a real bunny only one of them actually tastes good raw now I should point out Dent corn is used in a lot of things that we do consume like cornmeal and high fructose corn syrup it's also used in Industrial Products like paint Plastics but in recent years such uses have only accounted for around 15% of what we do with Dent

corn with around 40% being used for Liv stock feed and the final 45% becoming the gasoline alternative ethanol but as you will see while corn is incredibly versatile the way we've incentivized farming it has caused considerable Downstream harm because it turns out Corn's utter dominance of American agriculture comes to the expense of our environment our health and some of our farming communities just listen to One scientist who grew up farming sum up how he feels about it I go by a field of corn looks beautiful to me you know that that comes from having grown

up on the Kansas farm if you're not aware as to what it is that stands behind all of that agriculture you can live with the illusion that there's nothing wrong right if you don't know what's behind those stalks of corn you can easily believe that there is nothing wrong but I've already shown you that there could well be a bunch of fifth graders wandering around back there running low on Supply so I think we're past the point of the illusion here and given that tonight let's talk about a few of the key problems with corn

specifically how we subsidize it how we grow it and what we shove it into and let's start with the fact that the US is incredibly well suited to growing corn as this professor explains in a bizarre walkand talk it's really a tropical crop warm season crop but the growing season here the precipitation the rainfall that we get the amount of light that we get all those things combined to just be a a wonderful perfect environment for it to grow in what is happening there whose idea was it to make him do that you know what

would make this point about the perfect climate of the Corn really land for people Professor Roger Elmore being aggressively groped by horny stalks of it but while chemical fertilizers careful breeding and new technology have made Farmers able to grow massive amounts of corn government policy has also played a significant role by by heavily thumbing the scale in incentivizing what crops Farmers choose to grow modern farm policy was born during the Great Depression when Farmers faced a crisis nearly a million lost their farms in the first four years alone and that is when FDR's Administration passed

legislation to drive the price of farmed Goods up during times of over Supply by doing things like paying Farmers to plant less but a key turning point came in the 1970s thanks to in large part to a man named and this is true Earl butts his nickname was actually Rusty meaning he was known as and this is true again Earl Rusty butts anyway buts who was Nixon's agriculture secretary disagreed with the policy of paying Farmers to reduce Supply and sought to swing the pendulum all the way in the opposite direction with the new Farm Act

we have experienced a 180 degree turn in the philosophy of our farm programs we've abandoned the longtime philosophy of curtailment and cut back to the new philos phos opy of expansion we're going to see the most massive increase in production of farm products ever in the history of this country yeah Rusty buts a man who looks like he'd probably one day have to resign after saying a racial slur insisted everyone should grow more and he did that only a few years before unsurprisingly resigning after saying a racial slurp but while he was still in the

job buts pushed hard for Farmers to expand their operations and Nixon's 1973 Farm Bill reflected his philosophy Farmers would no longer be paid for not planting crops instead if prices fell below a certain Target the federal government would simply pay Farmers to make up the difference significantly reducing the risk of expanding your operation and incentivizing Farmers to go as big as they could these policies help create almost immediate surpluses in commodity crops especially corn and similar policies still exist today and on top of them the government now issues subsidies to pay for part of a

farmers's crop insurance which provides coverage to Farmers if their crops fail those subsidies have amounted to over 60% of the insurance premiums in recent years and while these policies sometimes get positioned as protections for small farm family Farmers the truth is that is not who reaps the vast majority of the benefits which tend to flow to the biggest producers in fact over the last 28 years the top 10% of farm subsidy recipients received 79% of the subsidies with over a quarter of them going to the top 1% meanwhile the vast majority of farmers do not

benefit from Farm subsidy programs at all and that is for many reasons not least of which is that it's much harder for small farms which might grow a wider variety of crops to qualify for them just listen to this family explain their small farm situation we grow tomatoes we grow basil we grow cauliflower we grow broccoli we grow um chard and carrots we grow the health healthiest crops we we possibly can't I don't think there is a subsidy for any of the crops we grow as far as I'm concerned the only subsidies out there are

for the big grain producers okay first let me just address something quickly that's a up looking carrot that that kid is holding there but second it does feel wrong that an operation growing healthy produce wouldn't receive any subsidies even if it is called s which sounds less like a small family farm and more like a pH balancing douche and so big land owners have over the years developed all sorts of ways to gain the farm subsidy system for instance payments used to be capped on a per Farm basis so they simply started subdividing themselves into

multiple entities Each of which could then collect the maximum payout back in the 2000s the GAO pointed out this problem noting that one land owner in Arkansas David Brooks Griffin had split his farm into 66 smaller ones and seem to be listing his employees as their owners just watch what happened when one reporter tried to pay Griffin a visit we wanted to speak with Mr Griffin shown here leaving on his helicopter but he refused so instead we set out to find some of the people Griffin enlisted as owners of those smaller Farms it took some

hunting for us to find Quia pots I'm a partner in three different Farms the government lists him as a part owner of several of the smaller Farms but like many listed as owners of paper Farms pots appeared to be an owner in name only the records indicate over 3 years you received $340,000 through the Farms through the farm payments that's right but did you put that money in your bank account yeah no yeah of course no that is very well said and if you're wondering how to tell who the real owner of the farm is

it is not the guy who agreed to that interview and it is the guy showed leaving on his helicopter but USDA investigators said that that was perfectly legal and Incredibly some of the rules have only gotten looser since then under the current farm bill that per Farm payment limit has been scrapped and while there is technically a limit of $125,000 per year per person crucially there is no cap on how many people can reach the payment limit so in addition to more immediate family members like parents siblings and adult children cousins nieces or nephews also

qualify for payments the only real requirement is that you must be actively engaged in farming but it turns out even that doesn't really mean much the definition of actively engaged in farming is very vague so you can call into a shareholder meeting every now and then a few times a year or do things like have some small Financial Risk in the farm in order to receive payments so you don't have to ever set foot on a farm to receive these payments that's true you don't have to even set foot on a farm you can just

be the farm owner's cousin which as we are all aware can be someone you barely know a normal relationship with your cousin is get their holiday card announcing their third pregnancy think didn't they say they hated kids hang the card on your fridge and then throw it away once you stop feeling guilty all of which in my opinion doesn't entitle you to $125,000 a year and look it is not like corn is the only crop that we subsidize in this way you could make similar criticisms of wheat or soybeans but the biggest share of these

subsidies in recent decades have gone to Corn far surpassing that of any other crop basically in the world of agricultural products corn is the unquestionable Superstar beans want to be it oats want to it and and as the corn industry has ballooned some of the biggest beneficiaries haven't actually been the farmers themselves but enormous corporations from these four companies that now dominate the nitrogen fertilizer industry to these two that now dominate nearly three quarters of the supply of seeds for corn and the production of corn has become increasingly Industrial the methods that we've used to

supercharge its growth have taken a toll on the environment take nitrogen fertilizer it is needed to intensively Farm one crop over and over again especially if Farmers don't take steps to protect the soil's natural fertility and corn uses the most fertilizer of all major US crops and that can have consequences that many scientists including that guy that you saw earlier are very concerned about because nitrogen fertilizer is the biggest contributor to a problem that happens when contaminated water on agricultural land leeches into groundwater or runs off into rivers and streams and eventually gets into our

drinking water which can cause a condition with a truly horrifying name since the 1940s scientists have warned that exposure to excess nitrates can inhibit oxygen circulation in an infant's blood consuming high nitrate water will tend to strip oxygen out of the blood and that's produces this blue baby syndrome it's true there is a condition called blue baby syndrome where excess nitrates deprive kids of oxygen and it can be fatal it is so horrifying you're not even registering that that man is called Randy beavers which in any other situation would be all anyone cares about and

I do hope we can all at least agree no child should ever be turned blue unless they disobeyed Mr Wonka's clear instructions about not trying the chewing gum and now suffering the only slight L disproportionate consequences and it's not just humans at risk here because when that contaminated runoff eventually washes into the sea it can cause serious problems in there too as this local news reporter chose to tell people in a totally normal way here is a little bit what it's like to be a fish this time of year in parts of the Chesapeake Bay

can't breathe I can't breathe that's because in the hottest part of the summer as much as 15% of the Bay has no oxygen in the water it's called The Dead Zone bre what are you doing the number one thing you are taught as a child is not to put a plastic bag over your head and he's doing it on TV which is hugely Reckless everyone has a plastic bag it's not hard to get I've got one right here but I know I know I shouldn't put it on my head not even to make a point

about the lack of oxygen in the be Bay or about how you shouldn't put a plastic bag on your head on TV I I I could do it but but but I shouldn't it's tempting but I won't I won't children are watching not mine they said you couldn't pay us to watch which for what it's worth I kind of do all their money was first my money but that said it's a no for my kids anyway I I won't do it but this isn't goodbye it's see you later and it's not just the Chesapeake the

Gulf of Mexico has a dead zone that at one point was the size of New Jersey with studies finding Farm fertilizer is the single largest contributor over farming of corn is also led to severe erosion in some areas which can lead to hazardous dust storms in fact this storm from last year in Central Illinois killed seven people and was directly tied to Farmers tilling their land to plant corn and soybeans so we've talked about how our subsidies for corn have caused an increase in production and we've talked about how we grow it which brings us

to the third set of problems here what we put in in and remember 40% of the Corn that we grow is going to feed cows Hogs and poultry and while livestock has always been fed some corn the use of it has been turbocharged by the fact that it is now so cheap as one journalist has written taxpayer subsidies for corn have served as Financial jet fuel for a new breed of industrial meat producers because feed is their biggest cost but the thing is these animals aren't evolved to have a diet that is predominantly corn it's

bad for their digestive system as this man in the car explains to those two documentaries that you saw earlier in a weirdly cheery way what are you eating for lunch or uh today cornfed beef do you actually know anything about cornfed bee do you know what it does to them what is it to the cabin um it's a good thing they slaughter when they do because it actually kills them to feed them to make the meat like that so they'd be dead in 6 months anyway eating that stuff so it's just as well that they

slaughter really yeah it's terrible where is this every major confinement feed lot everywhere honestly I kind of love that guy he should be the mascot for every fast food chain Ronald McDonald this is the most accurate mascot imaginable an impossibly American man who thinks the food tastes good knows it's tied to suffering and ultimately just wants to bring his Wild Card energy to the parking lot this is my Burger King right here and the problems corn causes for the digestive systems of livestock can leave cattle more susceptible to liver abscesses which is a major reason

why antibiotics are often added to the feed of entire herds of beef cattle a practice that the who has discouraged and of concerned that it's contributing to expanding antibiotic resistance and I admit it is much less fun to learn about that from me than it would have been from that guy absolutely housing his cheeseburger yeah medicated feed might give us all antibiotic resistant UTI bonap te cornfed beef but maybe the most ridiculous way that we use corn is ethanol which remember accounts for 45% of our domestic corn use ethanol used to be known as gahle

and while it's been around since the 30s it was during the 1970s energy crisis that it really took off with boosters like this Illinois Agriculture official Leading The Way with an unfortunate historical analogy Mr Mavis why are you so high on gasal well if you can tell I have some age on me Charlene and it's probably since Pearl Harvard the only thing that I've seen that's been good for all of America that's a pretty weird way to characterize Pearl Harbor the surprise attack that killed over 2400 people and led to the US entering World War

II but you know what let's give that guy a break he probably just misspoke I'm sure he won't say it again it burns without use of tetra ayad eliminates an EPA problem it employs people in America it takes an agricultural Surplus as kill us and turns it into Dollars instead of the storage it's it's that Pearl Harbor we've needed okay okay the first time he said it I thought I don't think Al Mavis knows what Pearl Harbor is the second time I thought maybe I don't know what PE Harper is cuz what is going on

there was Al Mavis of the Illinois Department of Agriculture and Admiral in the Japanese Navy cuz I don't know what the other explanations could be I'm just saying it this point I can only assume that the people in knew him spent 911 tifully going Al would have loved this but Al maybe got his way basically in an attempt to reduce our dependency on foreign oil we passed the energy Tax Act of 1978 which encouraged the use of gahol or ethanol but what really set the wheels in motion for our huge ethanol industry today was the

2005 Energy bill that created the Renewable Fuel standard which mandated that a certain amount of renewable fuel had to be blended into the domestic gasoline Supply essentially every gallon of domestic gasoline now legally has to have at least a little bit of ethanol in it the same way that every pop album currently has to have at least a little bit of Jack antinoff it's just the law now understandably that mandate created even more demand for corn in the domestic market and some like this Iowa farmer were thrilled by that we've seen our yields rais quite

a bit in the last several years and and we needed a place for this extra corn to be going and and ethanol has filled that um for us um I'm sure there's some negatives but I guess I I I'm not thinking of them right now yeah I'm sure you're not but to be fair that is not really your job unfortunately though it is mine thinking of the negatives is pretty much all I do here along with speaking the negatives out loud and making jokes about the negatives or one modeling the latest suits from Sir Michael

gamon's habitatery for oddly long gentlemen and the truth is there are lots of negatives when it comes to ethanol mainly because the positives have been so wildly overstated while ethanol lobing groups have long argued that it slashes Greenhouse emissions one recent study found that thanks to the fertilizer and land use changes needed to grow the corn for it corn ethanol produced under the Renewable Fuel standard has a carbon footprint at least 24% higher than regular gasoline on top of that the demand for ethanol is now expanding production to areas where it is much less suited

to be grown places like Texas and Western Kansas where the shortage of water means that corn fields need to be irrigated but that is a real problem because corn is a water intensive crop and it can take hundreds of gallons of water to produce a single gallon of ethanol and this is all happening even as groundwater is being dangerously depleted Nationwide and that brings us back to our larger Point here well well for some big farm operations and especially the big companies that benefit from corn there may be no negatives to the current way that

we produce it for everyone else there really are from dust storms to sick cows to blue babies to this reporter from your absolute nightmares so what can we do well for starters I would argue that we have to rethink the Renewable Fuel standard because it just makes no sense but on top of that we might want to significantly reset our farm policy one idea that's been floated is to make the federal safety net for Farmers contingent on them having a strategy for things like preserving top soil controlling chemical runoff and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and

the good news is the farm bill is actually currently up for Renewal and we could do all of that the bad news is as you have seen there are powerful interests with no reason to want the status quo to change at all but it just has to and let me be clear here this is not a takeown of corn I know for large swats of America it's an understandable symbol of Pride and source of jobs and I also get that it is frustrating to be lectured about it or be panded to by a politician pretending

to be fascinated by its ears but I do think it is long past time that we shift our farming policy when it comes to America's number one crop and maybe the best way to drive this home is to explain it in the way that people seem to most enjoy being educated about corn and that is watching someone be absolutely assaulted by it because look corn is as beautiful to watch grow as it is to eat slathered in butter but unless we force the government and the handful of large companies that control this industry to change

their priorities we're going to be stuck where we are like a bunch of fifth graders in the world's largest corn maze begging for our lives that is our show thanks so much for watching we're off next week we're back the week after that we'll see you then good night how the do I get out of here is it is it this way and get off me get off me give me some personal space I don't like to be touched by corn or honestly anybody