Only you can prevent… A lot of things.

I live in a rural area. Some of you already know that and maybe have even been here. For the rest, even though I live in the center of town, there is a dairy farm 6 blocks one way and a hog farm 4 blocks another way. The entire town is surrounded by field after field. This truly is corn country.

It’s February in corn country, and with that comes the first stage of prepping the ground for many of the farmers. While I rent from organic farmers (and the owners of the hog farm above) many around me are not organic and in fact have fields of corn planted with seeds from a certain company that starts with an M, ends with an O, and is overflowing with GMOs as a means of business success. (I’m just a blogger with no gain for them if they sued me but I’m not chancing it. They’re evil.)

So as I lie here, blogging before I go to sleep, I hear a steady hum of trucks. We don’t get much traffic here. The school has events and traffic picks up at the start and finish but otherwise it’s a car every few minutes. Until now, that is. The ammonia trucks are out.

Ammonia, you ask? Yes. Ammonia. If you don’t get to the country much and don’t obsess over documentaries like I do, you probably wonder how that relates to food.

See, over the past century, farming has drastically changed. Corn is grown from very strong seeds, planted closer together, and generally gives off a much bigger yield. The thing about this corn is that it is initially fertilized with anhydrous ammonia. The chemicals, which are petroleum based, are pumped into the ground as Spring draws near. As I understand it, the ground needs some time to disburse the chemicals before the plants go in the ground.

Then the seeds go in, the corn comes up, and it is fed to livestock or made into high fructose corn syrup. We have the largest grain supply in history but it isn’t fit for human consumption in its solid form. Instead, when you eat a steak or drink a regular soda, you are consuming this corn in a roundabout way. The corn that was once started off by being jump started in the soil with a petroleum product is now in your belly.

I don’t care how far removed the finished product is from the fertilizer. It still affects our food.

You can go by certain fields any time of year, but especially right now, and you can smell it. It seeps out of the ground and into the air. We have one field that is especially strong and it took a long time for me to realize my kids hadn’t passed gas at that exact locale every time we went by.

This brings me to my thoughts on it.

First of all, this only goes on because we let it. I’m not expecting you to run out and throw yourself on the ground in front of a fertilizer truck. I’m not even asking you to write a letter. All I’m asking is that you do what you can to get free range, grass fed meat (or even cut it out completely) and drop HFCS for your diet. You will feel better without HFCS in everything you eat and it will send a message to the company that you will not contribute to the demand for this chemical as it sits in their product. Easy enough, right?

Once again, we will have a garden when the weather stabilizes. We will skip the HFCS and cut way back on meat. We will compost. We will do what we can.

I hope you will do the same. You deserve better and so does your family.