Take a drive through the U.S. Midwest and you can’t miss the seemingly endless fields of corn. Depending on the season, the corn may be tall and green or dry and brown, or already combined, leaving vast swatches of barren soil exposed. None of the scenarios would appear particularly noteworthy to the average passerby, and certainly not cause for alarm.

However, if you dig a bit deeper into the reality of not just the U.S. Corn Belt, but also the massive amounts of corn being grown around the globe, a darker picture begins to emerge. Gone are the days of small-town farmers growing just enough corn to feed locals and, perhaps, their livestock over the winter.

In the 21st century, the two major consumers of corn are industrial in nature: concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and ethanol. There’s now so much corn grown in the U.S. that the Corn Belt (typically said to include corn grown across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and parts of Nebraska and Kansas) can be seen from space, courtesy of satellite chlorophyll-sensors.¹

There’s a tendency to think of corn as natural and even all-American, but as its true environmental costs become clear — growing corn is not only chemical-intensive but also requires significant amounts of water and land, leading to air pollution, water scarcity and more — accountability is becoming more important.

Where in the Supply Chain Is Corn Causing the Most Environmental Harm?

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tackled the monumental task of figuring out which U.S. counties produced the most corn as well as where that corn ended up downstream, right down to the various supply chains and industries.² “Think of the new research as a computer model of the United States of Corn,” Bloomberg reported, continuing:³

“The general problem that the researchers took on — prompted by a collaboration with the nongovernmental organization the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — is that some 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions and water use of economic production is bound up in an enormous, poorly documented network of supply chains.

Given the importance of corn to both the meat and ethanol industries, and the importance of the meat and ethanol industries to American consumers, they focused on that specific network.”

Kansas City, Missouri-based beef processor National Beef fared the worst in terms of irrigated water usage, coming in at 11.7 cubic meters per bushel of corn in their supply chain. Minnesota-based Cargill, for comparison, used 5.7 cubic meters to Virginia-based Smithfield’s 1.3. Flint Hills Resources, the fifth largest ethanol producer in the U.S., headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, used 1.4 cubic meters of irrigated water per bushel while South Dakota-based biofuel company POET came in at 0.2.

As for greenhouse gas emitted per bushel of corn in each company’s supply chain, Cargill came in at 11.6 CO2-equivalent, kg, the highest of the group, followed by POET at 10.7, National Beef at 10.4 and Smithfield Foods at 10.2.⁴ As Bloomberg noted, the hope is that by exposing this information it will drive (or force) companies to adopt more sustainable models:⁵

“With localized information about where corn comes from, and where it ends up being eaten by cattle, swine, or fowl, or cooked into auto fuel, companies can better understand where in their supply chains the most carbon is burned, the most water is used, and where the landscape is most transformed.”

Industrial Agriculture Rivals Deforestation in Environmental Destruction

Carbon erosion from the land and into the water and air is creating a very unstable environment. While removal of forests that cannot only sustain but also regenerate our soils and solidify this fragile carbon balance is a major part of the problem, so too, is industrial agriculture, including the removal of grasslands to plant more corn.

Previous estimates suggest that one-third of the surplus carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stems from poor land management processes that contribute to the loss of carbon, as carbon dioxide, from farmlands.⁶

A recent study also revealed “hotspots of soil carbon loss, often associated with major cropping regions and degraded grazing lands” in the U.S. and suggested that such regions should be “targets for soil carbon restoration efforts.”⁷ Specifically, while deforestation is said to have resulted in 127 billion tons of carbon lost from the soil, the study found industrial agriculture has led to losses of 121 billion tons.

Soil scientist and study author Jonathan Sanderman, with the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “It’s alarming how much carbon has been lost from the soil. Small changes to the amount of carbon in the soil can have really big consequences for how much carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere.”⁸

Regenerative agriculture, including converting cornfields back to grasslands and saving natural grasslands that exist, is key to fixing the problem. This type of land management system promotes the reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by sequestering it back into the soil where it can do a lot of good. Once in the earth, the CO2 can be safely stored for hundreds of years and actually adds to the soil’s fertility.