Very interesting. Modern technology lets you grow corn that would previously take 120 days in 80, and everything is getting cheaper and more efficient. At the same time prices for corn are falling, but nobody wants to stop growing it because they're locked in with expensive equipment.
A similar oversupply happened right before the Great Depression.
Wheat prices were dropping from too much supply partially attributed to newly expanded prairie farming in the US. But these farmers owed fixed costs on their mortgaged land. So to pay their expenses, they plowed up more prairie and grew more wheat. This compounded the supply problem. Eventually, as wheat piled up at railroad depots unable to be sold, farmers left the plowed prairie fallow and the topsoil blew away.
Thing is, prices for food never really shot back up massively, instead our govt ended up creating price floors for many commodities, insofar as they would give farmers money if what they produced was sold for less than a certain amount[1].
This led to consolidation, whereby family farmers became much fewer in number, and those that owned and operated larger farms ended up working a 2nd job to cover their living expenses. What used to take a whole family to farm is now nearly entirely automated, causing food prices to continue to decline.
> What used to take a whole family to farm is now nearly entirely automated, causing food prices to continue to decline
I don't see the immediate causal relationship between these: cars are semi-automatically manufactured, but the price of cars hasn't declined anywhere near as much as grain/commodities.
The quality of vehicles has increased dramatically over that time. There isn't a similar increase in the quality of grain.
A vehicle that I purchased roughly ten years ago has operated perfectly fine with half of its scheduled oil changes and very little other maintenance. From an engineering perspective I find that mind-blowing: you buy these machines and they operate flawlessly for years, running for thousands of miles, while performing a complex, mechanical task with many moving parts. It's easy to take for granted how marvelous modern automobiles have become.
Thanks for explaining how car quality has improved, but I still don't follow your link between automation and price decreases. I feel like your explanation doesn't address the market side of farming, and disregards the huge advances in crop & agricultural science.
Not the OP, but the point is that the car you buy today has much more value than a car that was sold 20 years ago at a similar price. So, even if the average price paid for a new car didn't go down, the price for the same car has effectively decreased, thanks to automation.
I still don't see how this relates to farm automation: automation didn't significantly change the price point, it increased production, decreased labor costs and increased equipment/maintenance costs.
I can't help but get the sense that you want to see "factor X made Y cheaper" come out in Y getting absolutely cheaper. But it's just a single factor in a complex world. Consider the alternative; do you really think that removing the automation today would have no impact on the price? Even after the economy had a chance to adjust? Personally I find the idea incredible, in the older sense of "not credible".
> do you really think that removing the automation today would have no impact on the price?
I haven't considered that! I know it would affect production speed, which could be addressed by increasing capex to build more factories, and which could be funded by increased revenue or investment.
But here's the thing: this car talk doesn't help me understand how agricultural automation caused grain prices to drop. That's my question & what I continually seek clarification on.
BTW you can just ask me what I think instead of offering me some strawman claim to take under my wing. Argue in good faith! If a point of view sounds incredible to you, just go right ahead and assume I must have a more credible point of view that I haven't communicated effectively yet.
The reason I posted is that you did not seem to be. People kept giving you reasons, and you basically discarded them with "But that's not the reason I'm looking for"... or something like that. I'm not even sure how to accurately characterize it. But you definitely seemed to be just unilaterally dismissing the people trying to help you understand and putting no effort into understanding what they were saying. Your second paragraph of this very post reads like that once again.
If that is not the case, well, consider this useful feedback then.
I don't need help understanding how the analogy to car automation is wrong, I get that. I gave it as an example of how automation did not reduce prices.
The 'good faith' part which the responders are failing at is badgering me to accept their explanations of car manufacturing in place of farm automation. I accept their explanations but it does not help me understand this:
Why does the GP think that agricultural automation caused the decline in prices?
If I again get a response talking about cars: I don't get it. I don't understand. I can't work it out. I need help to see the connection. It doesn't make sense to me.
Please, help me understand instead of deriding me for not accepting an explanation about car manufacturing as an substitute.
What's happened with farming has been a tremendous reduction in the amount of human and animal energy inputs though a set of factors:
* Increased mechanisation of farming -- direct muscle-power substitution.
* Increased fertiliser application -- removal of binding constraints on plant productivity (see Leibig's Law of the minimum).
* Increased pesticide application -- removal of parasite load and requirements for plant-provided parasite defence from production.
* Breeding for increased caloric yield -- given the reduced demands on non-food plant metabolic expenditure, more of that energy budget is channeled into high-yield varietals and cultivars. (Howard Odum has excellent discussion of pest/productivity dynamics in plant energy budgets.)
* Increased overall agricultural knowledge and management. Approaching the potential envelope by following maximally-effective practices. The ability to motivate large-scale activities quickly (e.g., harvest entire fields within days or hours of optimal state) factors into this.
There's also the fact that the energy substituted for human and animal inputs is subject to a natural capital draw-down understatement of 10^2 to 10^6 magnitude (and more likely the higher). Petroleum and natural gas prices (NG is the primary input to nitrogen fertiliser production) are grossly understated under current economic and accounting models.
For automobiles, the price reductions are less evident in large part because the starting point in the story occurs well into the inputs- and process-modification regime. If you extend the concept of "making cars" to "wagon construction and iron smelting" as of the 16th or 17th century, when wrought iron was fired by charcoal, not rock coal, you'd see fairly comparable efficiency gains. Metalurgy made tremendous leaps in the 19th century (Bessemer steel, 1860s, aluminium smelting, 1880s) as well, far in advance of generally affordable automobiles (1910s) and the explosion in automobile ownership (1950s, for the U.S., later elsewhere).
Robert J. Gordon notes that the rate of patent filings for both automobiles and aircraft peaked by the 1920s. Not that there hasn't been additional technical refinement, but the rate is markedly slower. (See The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016.)
Much automobile development has also gone into what I'd call technological "hygiene factors" -- addressing consequences of the initial concept development: safety, pollution, efficiency, and reliability. Another set of developments have gone into factors which influence surface appeal but do little for functional performance, call it bling. (Gordon also addresses, though IMO mis-attributes this factor.)
There are other factors. So long as automobiles are made of steel or aluminium, there's a fixed energy cost in their production (ore reduction, refining, and smelting). Until and unless the underlying materials are substituted, that will remain. Actual assembly is fairly straightforward, and Henry Ford had already done a great deal to optimise assembly-line methods. The increased use of robotics substitutes more for the control element of labour than the energy input (as was the case in ag), resulting in more precision and consistency (and enabling greater complexity -- the Jevons Paradox). The cost of actually programming automated assembly equipment has (at least until recently) rivalled the cost of the robotics themselves. "Cheaply programmable" had not been a feature.
Upshot: Farming as of 1920 offered far more opportunities for optimisation than automobile manufacture did. Automobile manufacturing saw additional, non-performance features added. Automation substituted for different factors than mechanisation. Corn and wheat don't demand cupholders, electric windows, in-vehicle entertainment, and self-parking systems.
The general phenomenon is the "Backward-S Shaped Supply Curve", and yes, I mention the Dust Bowl instance (from Egan via Burns's PBS series) sepecifically. There are others.
You'll see this phenomenon any time an economic agent (individual person, labour market, farmer, extractive resource operator) has some inflexible and fixed minimum set of costs to maintain or they will go out of existence, vs. some variable production function or market price structure.
It's similar with the general aviation phenomenon of "failure to maintain altitude". Aircraft fly fairly well through air. Performance characteristics through land or water are rather less optimal.
That's not why. It's because the US government so aggressively subsidizes corn. This is done at the behest of the Ag lobby, which represents corn-buying conglomerates who love low corn prices.
Iowa is one of the largest corn producing states, and also the first to hold primary elections (technically it's a caucus, but still it's considered an important milestone). If you want to be president, you'd be foolish to be on the record going against corn subsides.
Ag programs are byzantine and corn is subsidized several ways-- through price floors, crop insurance, the ethanol mandate, and import tariffs on sugar (which created the market for high fructose corn syrup, which is derived from corn). The model has failed in important ways and isn't directly transferrable to fruits and veggies. The biggest thing is that the value of the subsidies is capitalized into land prices-- there actually isn't a subsidy for corn at all, if you are new farmer, because you have to pay for it when you buy or lease land.
As a Canadian corn grower, I'm not sure how the US (or Canadian for that matter) government is subsidizing me growing corn, but the reality is that the prices were still quite strong at the start of the year when we were looking at contracts for the season. I'm very happy with my corn position this year.
We may have reevaluate growing corn in the future if the market does dry up (although for crop rotation purposes that is a hard choice to make), but when the market is buying it at a profitable level, why wouldn't we grow it?
So with the support prices, unless the yield prices goes below support, people will still grow corn.
As how does it affect Canada? For one, Canada will surely be having it's own insurance program. Second, It is a simple arbitrage play, if Canadian supply is cheaper people will buy cheap corn from there and import to US.
Curious what price level you would say is unprofitable to grow corn?
> Canada will surely be having it's own insurance program.
The main one is production insurance, protecting against disaster events like weather. It doesn't focus on price. Of course, it applies to all crops, not just corn, providing incentive to grow something – whatever is profitable due to market demands – but not corn specifically.
In the last few years there has been an addition of a program that sounds more like you describe the US system, but it seems ill-conceived and not clear how you would ever get your premiums back. I have not enrolled in it personally. It definitely is not impacting my decision to grow corn.
> if Canadian supply is cheaper people will buy cheap corn from there and import to US.
Naturally, but that only works if there is demand. The parent seemed to be suggesting that the US government subsidizes US farmers to grow corn due to the absence of market demand.
> Curious what price level you would say is unprofitable to grow corn?
I would say the breakeven point is somewhere around $4.50/bu. for my business. I have most of my corn crop sold at $5 this year, so I'm comfortable with those margins. Wheat is the crop that is going to be a money loser for the foreseeable future.
<em>but when the market is buying it at a profitable level, why wouldn't we grow it?</em>
Because much of corn is turned into HFCS, which is so cheap it's added to everything, which is causing a huge spectrum of preventable diseases, such as metabolic dysfunction, which in turn is partly the cause of bankrupting national healthcare programs?
I'm about ad "anti-big-corn" as it gets, but this HFCS propaganda has got to end. It's literally just sugar. Too much sugar makes you sick. The fact that HFCS is liquid and cheap means you can put it in more food, but at the end of the day it just comes down to the fact that "too much sugar is bad."
The main reason prices are falling is that we are coming off the biggest commodities boom in history. 2008-2013 saw record setting prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Really, things are just returning to normal now that the boom is over.
As you would expect, marketing corn is more challenging now, after the boom, but there is still opportunity for money to be made. The thing about these crops is that the market price can swing by fairly large amounts in the matter of days, so the fact that a losing venture today can become a huge profit opportunity next week keeps people interested.
There is no lack of people keen to buy land and equipment if someone really wants out of the business, but we're not that bad off yet.
The other issue is that many of the "boom" prices are based on the spot market price, but the majority of these commodities are actually negotiated through long term contracts that have a steadier income, but much fewer highs and lows. Which is why a multi-year drop can be especially hard for producers, since that's the price that often gets locked in for several seasons.
Around here people tend to look at unused land and lament that it was all farmed 30 years ago.
But the reality is that grain growing operates on ever-thinner margins. It now makes sense to skim grain from the best lands, insolation and precipitation-wise, and leave the rest to grasses, shrubs and marshes. What do people do in depressed regions in the absense of productivity, especially in the country, is another story.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the reduction of Fed stimulus - reduction of quantitative easing as well as low inflation rate. It's not just grains that have slumped -- almost every major commodity is down from its 5 year high.
Technology / productivity / yield increases have massively outpaced population gains, so that hundreds of millions of fewer people are starving today compared to a few decades ago, despite billions of more people.
The new fear seems to be that all this food is actually becoming less nutritious due to increased CO2[0]. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in coming years.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...."
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
His first sentence appears to be correct - just not in the direction he meant.
He's still making similar doom-laden predictions, and still getting paid lots of money for them.
Famine is caused by poor distribution, not poor production.
From your link: "The world produces enough food to feed everyone."
Further: "For the world as a whole, per capita food availability has risen from about 2220 kcal/person/day in the early 1960s to 2790 kcal/person/day in 2006-08, while developing countries even recorded a leap from 1850 kcal/person/day to over 2640 kcal/person/day."
The quote from the post I replied to mentions “the battle to feed humanity”. Distribution is very much part of that battle; otherwise it could only be considered solved in the purest theoretical sense.
Yeah, and you can also talk about specific nutrient needs, and really the obesity epidemic is also a part of the battle to feed humanity.
But Ehrlich wasn't talking about any of that. He was specifically saying there was no way we could produce enough food to feed the population of the world in the 1970s, and we'd have to drastically curtail population to survive.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole."
It's not even that though -- we can distribute, very well. We can send grain in container ships, do air drops, land trains, all sorts. We can process, preserve, etc. to avoid spoiling.
None of that is the problem that causes famine.
We don't want to feed people who aren't paying; or people in power don't see it as useful.
It's not a practical problem it's all political, surely?
"a distribution problem" is not a problem of how to physically transport something over a distance. A "distribution problem" in economic terms is how good are allocated to those who want it, or rather, how this allocation fails. It fails, for example, in places where there is no or insufficient government or rule of law. So the GP was already saying what you are, but in a more nuanced (and better) way. Saying 'it's all political' is just saying 'it's all the fat cat's fault'. But it's much more subtle than that; for example, endemic corruption also causes economic misallocation, and it's a cultural problem, not a 'political' one per se.
>"Famine is caused by poor [food] distribution, not poor production."<
The thread was specifically about food surplus, the GP & parent comments both specify it.
There's no reason to think either had the definition you use in mind. Surely that's "allocation"; I don't find your definition apparent -- unqualified "distribution" primarily in economics sources (I checked Economist, Investopedia, couple of other s) refers to "income distribution".
Given how blunt and lacking in nuance you found my post it's interesting you deliberately miscast "politics" as limited in scope to the actions of rich capitalists.
Saying "it's political" means it's down to motive and not ability. We can distribute food to everyone, people at some level "choose" not to. Do you disagree?
A major problem as far as I can see is malnutrition not undernutrition, poor people aren’t eating enough vegetables, protein and other important nutrients and mostly filling up on grain.
Rich people (almost everyone in Western society) are being conned in to eating low quality, unhealthy foods by people with massive advertising budgets who don't have to pick up the healthcare bills.
These predictions of doom (Thomas Malthus, Club of Rome, Global Warming, Y2K) all have the 'problem' of being self-defeating: It's unclear to what degree they were wrong only because societies reacted to them. China's One-Child policy, or family planning as a major component of developmental aid, for example, may have been consequences of the prophecies of overpopulation.
It's correct in the long long term. Population rates have stabilized because of birth control (in the first world anyway.) But in a few generations, people that are allergic to birth control, or genetically want large families or whatever, will dominate the population and growth will continue.
There are some religious groups that calculate if they can get each of their members to have 8 children, they will become the majority of the population in like 2 generations. Fortunately even the best groups only manage like 3 or 4 per couple on average. But that only pushes it out a few more generations. And the groups that are the best at keeping their members from leaving, and the members that are the most loyal, will naturally be selected for.
> There are some religious groups that calculate if they can get each of their members to have 8 children, they will become the majority of the population in like 2 generations.
Who are these groups? Do you refer to the "Quiverfull" movement?
In the developed world, highly religious groups are the only groups who have been able to sustain fertility rates above, say, 2.5 children per woman. The ones I am aware of are the Amish, Haredi Jews, Mennonites, and the Hutterites. All of those are around 6 children per woman.
The demographics of these groups have real consequences. The Amish have witnessed a 50-fold increase in population in the last 90 years (from 5,000 to 250,000). Haredi comprised only 5% of the Jewish population in Israel as recently as 1990, but they're now at 10% of the total Jewish population and a whopping 29% of the the Jewish population under 20 years of age.
I don't know what makes people think technological progress isn't slowing down. By any metric you choose to look at it is. GDP growth, life expectancy, etc. A modern person would be basically familiar with the household and lifestyle of 1940. A few differences, but most of the technology that we use today was already in place by then. Cars, electricity, washing machines, indoor plumbing, etc. A person from 1940 going back 77 years would be entering a different world.
The only real exception is computers, information processing technology. One exception doesn't disprove a trend. And even those have begun to slow down now that we are approaching the physical and economic limits.
I strongly recommend The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War which pounds this point home with example after example of just how much the world changed during the second industrial revolution.
If you zoom out far enough, all life grows at an exponential rate until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment. Perturbations in the curve exist only to the extent that you are zoomed way in or the species you are looking at is struggling to avoid extinction.
That depends an awful lot on how you define "carrying capacity".
For example, I'd define carrying capacity as to include consumer preferences in how much they want to have babies.
And if you include consumer preferences, well that changes the equation a whole lot. It means that you aren't necessarily going to get in a position where the stopping point is literally people starving to death.
All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies. And there are a whole lot of reasons as to why 2 people might only want to have 2 babies, other than being forced to under the threat of literal starvation.
>All you have to do is have the environment cause 2 people to only want to have 2 babies.
Those 2 people will be quickly replaced by the couple that wants to have 3 babies. Unless you pass and strongly enforce laws limiting reproduction, which our culture seems unwilling to do, you will get overpopulation.
Nature has a lot of population control mechanisms other than starvation. Like disease and predators. But humans have mostly eliminated those.
IMO, a better lens by which to examine human preferences is to take the position that humans are poorly evolved for modern life and that what we are witnessing right now with regards to plummeting birth rates is selection pressure which will force the human race to evolve immunity to modern life. As best as I can tell, the version of the human race that will result probably looks a lot like the fundamentalist religious sects that have high birth rates (Amish, Haredi, Mennonites, Hutterites, etc.). And the very poor.
rotenone is no longer certified in america as a pesticide [other than to kill fish]. May seem like nit, but it was a very dangerous pesticide and citing it as an organic pesticide might incorrectly lead to the conclusion that organic pesticides are not safer.
Let's eat pork then! They love corn, even though it makes them fat (white meat)
For those complaining about subsisides: any country worth its salt needs to make sure farmers and heavy industry don't go caput. People need to eat and someone needs to make tanks and bullets during tough times.
That's generally seen as a misguided attempt to maintain artificially high grain prices that ultimately yields almost zero benefit to farmers or consumers (serving only the ethanol producers and politicians).
Making ethanol from corn isn't a very efficient path. Using the land for PV arrays, and displacing petroleum with electricity instead of ethanol, is much more efficient.
I'm not well-educated in this stuff, so feel free to correct me.
My understanding is that artificially high grain prices are maintained so that factory farms don't completely run the family farms out of business. Is this correct?
If that is correct, and you are okay with artificially leveling the playing field, wouldn't it then make sense to find ways to actually put the product to use?
I don't think that assumption is correct. Why would subsidies help family farms over "factory farms"? In fact, Big Ag is one of the biggest advocates for the entire constellation of Ag subsidies.
It's not a good idea to artificially inflate prices. The article mentioned the food riots in third world a decade ago. There are real consequences to this sort of crony capitalism, and in this case very poor people actually can starve when the prices go up.
Not to mention that growing crops is incredibly energy intensive, so it turns out that ethanol really isn't good for the environment. In my opinion, terrible policy all around.
Edit: made my comment a little less confrontational :)
If that were correct, they'd limit the size of the subsidy to only the first N bushels of grain. Instead, the large farms get the vast majority of subsidies.
The direct combustion emissions can be about half in the right powertrain, but ethanol fermentation produces CO₂ on its own, as does the distillation process, as does the machinery involved in cycling and drying (possibly actively, consuming more energy to heat them, or passively, consuming more energy to transport them) the molecular sieves used to separate the azeotrope of H₂0 and ethanol. Furthermore, Ethanol is, gallon for gallon, about half as energy dense as gasoline.
Not a fan of ethanol production, but CO2 released fermenting and burning bio fuels is carbon neutral - the CO2 was bound in the plant by photosynthesis, then released by these processes.
Not a subtle distinction as in the US, natural gas is essentially all domestic (and is starting to be exported as well). The decision to grow ethanol is geopolitical at least as much as it has anything to do about the environment (remember, serious ethanol mandates started under Bush II) as part of the effort for energy independence, so trading natural gas for gasoline through ethanol (even if we wrongly assume it's as bad as 1:1) is still desirable.
Also, gasoline (C8H18) has a carbon to hydrogen ratio of approximately 0.44, compared to 0.25 for natural gas (CH4) (and natural gas has a higher specific energy), so from a carbon emissions perspective is still superior.
Additionally, natural gas in not "just a natural cracking product of petroleum." There are other significant geological sources of natural gas, and it is produced through decay of just about any organic matter.
Wouldn't the CO2 be absorbed over a period of time, which the combustion would do it all at once, being a net positive as far as the environment is concerned?
Or perhaps I don't understand how CO2 harms the environment well.
Yes, but on a time scale of a year or more (disregarding corn reserves, which probably do exist but are probably too small to matter), we can only emit the CO2 from corn ethanol at the same speed we absorb it. This is unlike fossil fuels, which took millions of years to form but which can be used much faster.
My farm. 6 gallons in tractor fuel and 2 gallons in truck fuel. If we didn't raise corn, we'd raise wheat which has similar fertility requirements as corn. Maybe a bit more urea on corn, 50 pounds or .11 barrels of oil equivalent.
We have a small North Dakota farm (500 acres) but I work with some larger farms (10,000+ acres). Farm management consulting and software is my full time gig
300 lbs of urea or .65 boe of NG (1 bbl of oil = 20 gallons of gas and 11 gallons of diesel). So let's just say 20 additional gallons of fuel to account for the N
Edit: the land would be planted to wheat if not planted to corn. Wheat uses approximately 80% of the N as corn. The land wouldn't sit idle.
Right, but people are talking about replacing more of the fuel with Ethanol than would help as antiknock. I can understand this if you want race fuel, but it isn't an environmental endeavor in itself to operate vehicles on E85 (or simple denatured ethanol) vs. common gasoline with ethanol for antiknock.
I'd be for it if people were talking about it as an economic effort, because that's where it can shine.
According to the chart on e85prices.com, it would appear that ethanol fuel prices are at a 5 year low. I'd be willing to bet that has something to do with low grain prices.
Wow, I guess haters gonna hate, because E85 only has 71.94% of the energy of a standard gasoline gallon. Of course Diesel#2 has 114% and biodiesel B100 has only 104% of the equivalent mileage per gallon.
They're kind of like a facts... or is it mobile link hate?
The story leads with climate changes, but other reasons include corn varieties that have shorter growing seasons. According to the query tool (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov), corn acreage in ND has gone from 1.0M acres in 2000 to 3.7M this year.
With less storms, and more rain at once; increasing runoff and erosion, lowering predictability/stability of farming. That is, if it doesn't just stop raining all together in a given area...
No, not oil. The Haber process uses hydrogen. Which almost all comes from natural gas right now.
(A note to clean hydrogen advocates: this is a much better market for hydrogen than burning it or converting to synthetic methane as it costs money to convert natural gas to hydrogen. Displace all that natural gas used for ammonia and nitrate fertilizer production before moving to burning it.)
Its almost as if the grain and corn could be fed to starving peoples around the world for a lower price.
Sarcasm aside, a lot of starvation could be counteracted with better distribution of excess corn at a lower price so I don't see a real problem. North American farms might be hit but the actual amount of labour needed at a massive corn-producing farm is shrinking every year due to technology (although there is also a agricultural labour shortage).
Most of the corn grown around here in Kansas is not the variety that you eat off the cob, it's the kind you feed to livestock. Shipping this corn off to starving people doesn't do much for them unless they want to raise cows and pigs on it.
The good news is that actual starvation has also been greatly reduced. Malnutrition remains a problem, and US corn and grain aren't really helpful for that. The other problem with the idea is that it runs the risk of destroying local food markets, destroying exactly the structures and institutions these countries need when the US inevitably stops dropping calories on them the next year.
Makes some sense. As a result of fast-growing corn, areas previously planted to wheat are switching to corn instead. This has increased the supply, and thus decreased the price, of corn -- but wheat, on the other hand, would see a corresponding decrease in supply, and increase in price.
This is also why cash crops can cause food shortages.
You can make bread from corn, though. I don't mean that sugary cake called "cornbread" in the US, I mean actual bread, but made from corn flours. It's one of our national delicacies: https://easyportugueserecipes.com/broa-de-avintes/
Fascinating! I am something of an amateur baker and I'd never heard of it.
I assume it comes from periods of high wheat prices, since it also heavily uses rye? Sadly rye (which I have something of a personal taste for, mostly in whiskey though!) is also being impacted by the economy's preference for corn; global production numbers for rye have been falling steadily particularly in the former Soviet countries. I have had difficulty sourcing rye flour that's not eye-wateringly expensive.
You are perhaps already familiar, but in Mesoamerica where corn originated, it is generally processed into flour only after alkaline processing. The resulting flour, typically sold as "masa" in the US, is distinct from simple ground corn (cornmeal or corn flour in the US). The difference is quite striking, both culinarily and nutritionally.
It still doesn't form the gluten that wheat dough, does, so I haven't had good luck making European-style breads with it (though I'd love to, because I live with someone who has a wheat allergy).
I have an idea. Corn farmers aren't making money, so let's subsidize corn farming to help them make money. Of course, that will lead to a worse oversupply, but hey, it's been working so far, right?
Annoying that the domain is "is there enough food for everyone" but the site asks the opposite question "do people still die of starvation" so the site has a big YES despite the answer to the question in the domain being NO.
Just noticed that the original(?) website of this type, http://www.isthesunburning.com, seems to be gone. In fact the last working snapshot on Archive.org[1] is from 2010. Guess I'll never know if the sun is burning now.
