Corn: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I am LITERALLY screaming, crying, and nodding my head with PURE JOY. As a soil science student and future conservation agronomist, I have been saying for YEARS everything that the Last Week Tonight team has reported here. There's much, much more to this than what they had time to cover, but the point being made here is that growing a heavily subsidized crop over millions of acres of what's left of our agricultural land in the way that it's grown and for the purposes it's grown causes MASSIVE damage to the land, the environment, our health, our economy, and our farm communities. This practice MUST STOP. Huge, huge thanks to John and the LWT team for bringing attention to this!!!

Monocropping bad. Monoculture bad. Diversified and companion planting good.

For those wondering where our old friend Monsanto is in this episode, that company has been bought by Bayer

John Oliver is the only person I can listen to talk about corn for this long

Thanks HBO for making Thursdays the new monday.

I grew up a small organic vegetable farm that directly feeds 500 families year round, supplies 3 small grocery stores, and 10 restaurants with the majority of their freah veggies, all without commercial fertilizers, herbacides or pesticides, all on 10 acres of land. Spoiler, we have never been eligible for a single aubsidy. Feeding PEOPLE hasn't ever been the point of a farm subsidy, when i was in high school the largest recipient of farm subsidies was the Chicago Bulls player Scotty Pippen...

As a native Iowan I'm really glad to see John cover this. The subsidies hurt small farmers and normal Iowans in the same way they benefit big ag. It's been one of the largest issues affecting our water sources and is one of the key ways big ag continues to control Iowa and hold oligopolies.

BRO YOU'RE MAKING SO MANY ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTISTS SCREAM WITH GLEE

Any time the word legal is prefixed with "perfectly" you know some shady shit is involved.

John Oliver managed in 25 minutes to do what Stephen King tried multiple times: Make Corn scary.

I grew up in Iowa in the 70's and 80's. Corn was everywhere. Detasseling was how I earned money for college. The mascot for the local children's theater was an anthropomorphic ear of corn. Corn was everywhere. I did start to wonder- if Iowa has such great soil and climate- why don't we grow other things? Tomatoes. Lettuce. Things we can actually eat.

Having a dad that’s on a farming cooperative board, I can definitely say that the way they say “actively farming” is just as true as to how they choose board members each year. I’d wish John do a separate video on that cause all of these farming companies are cooperatives which are supposed to be led by actual farmers but this hasn’t been the case.

I remember I had a professor in my early years of college who told us: “You want to know how to lose a presidential election in 5 seconds? Just say ‘I want the US farming sector to be a free market.’”

He forgot to mention that the corn subsidies in USA destroyed corn farming in Mexico greatly contributing to a lot of the current social problems in that country; including drug cartels, mass migration and displacement.

Here's an untold cost of growing corn: my Iowa grandparents spent 10 miserable years dying of Parkinson's disease in a nursing home. The incidence of this disorder is 6 times higher among farmers using pesticides around their rural wells. After a life of hardship growing America's crops crops, they had their they had their Golden Years taken away from them.

I suggest that every decision maker in the Corn industry read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan. The story of the Dust Bowl is laid out in the most graphic way possible. The story of what led up to the Dust Bowl is a story about the worst lies being packaged as great opportunities for poor folks trying to make a living growing wheat, but finding no water. It is a cautionary tale, so dark I could not get all the way through it. Thanks John!

When I find myself in times of trouble The news anchor says to me: "This will be your last Field trip"

Randy Beavers. Rusty Butz. Tricky Dicks. This episode had it all!

I'm a Kansan farmer, I've met Wes Jackson, worked in ag policy, and currently getting my PhD in agronomy. To say I'm in the middle of all this is an understatement...and John Oliver has nearly all of this correct. -Ethanol = Made-up BS -Corn Lobby is powerful -Subsidies mostly go to huge farms, all of which are divided into dozens of LCC/corps -Small farms still struggle. Many are failing and families are effectively in poverty. -We grow too much corn on land that can't support corn causing huge soil losses and nutrient runoff -Cattle die after eating corn for months...this is one thing that is actually incorrect, obviously cattle can't eat 100% corn and nothing else. If you only ate one specific thing for months, then you'd die too. -And for you city people, you can't 'just grow something else'. The choices are corn, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, and cotton/rice in some places. Everything you eat, like vegetables, require huge amounts of labor and markets that don't exist on the require scale needed.

King Corn is such an underrated gem of a documentary. Both super informative and entertaining while also being very authentic to the whole vibe of the story.