Corn Belt

Explain the spatial pattern of the corn (shown with red dots) and (since the 1950s increasingly) soybean belt.
How were the cities shown related to corn production?

Should corn be used to make ethanol gasoline? Answer.

Five corn growers in the Midwest received the equivalent of the annual budget dedicated to supporting farmers' markets.

Answers:

• the growing season gets longer and the soils are more productive than in the northern dairy farming region; to the west, the climate gets too dry for these crops; and farther south, the land is too hilly (Appalachian Plateau) and too hot
• all these cities have had stockyards to which farmers from the adjacent areas brought their fattened (on field corn and silage) pigs and beef cattle. Slaughter houses want to avoid the high wages of workers in the Midwest and moved meatpacking to the anti-union states of the West. Today, poultry processing in the Midwest is done mostly by un-unionized immigrants from predominantly from Mexico and other poor countries, such as Somalia.

Since the late 1960s, an "invisible" crop has been grown in the Midwest as well. During World War II, the USA government encouraged farmers in the Corn Belt to plant 300,000 acres of marijuana in the hopes of replacing fiber supplies from Asia. The program was called "Hemp for Victory." Although it was a financial failure, marijuana started to grow wild, locally known as ditch weed. Today's marijuana has much higher levels of delta-9-THC content -- the stuff that makes you "high" -- and could be the largest cash crop in the country produced by 100,000 to 200,000 farmers. While a bushel of corn sells for about $2, a bushel of manicured marijuana sells for $70,000 -- in large part because it is illegal!
Source: Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 30 April 1996; last revised on 07 Dec 2010.