On Corn Fields and Orange Groves

The dog days of summer are here, and with them comes that bugaboo of the Midwestern August: the oppressive humidity. June and early July may have their hot days, but they rarely have the oppressive humidity levels that you get in the gut slot of August. For those of you who’ve noticed that it’s been particularly burdensome this year, let me tell you the culprit: corn. This year, the U.S. farmer planted 92.9 million acres of corn, the most since World War II. As usual, the great majority of this corn was planted in what is known as the Corn Belt, that wide swath of land running across the middle of the country from the Ohio River Valley through the Midwest into the Great Plains, encompassing the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri, and eastern Kansas.

For years, I’ve been propagating the idea that the advent of a corn monoculture has been responsible for the crappy weather we get in Chicago every August. I came up with the idea after reading a study by Iowa state climatologist Elwynn Taylor detailing how Iowa had gotten slightly cooler but significantly more humid during the summer over the past century, which contrasts with the slightly warmer winters that Iowa has witnessed compared to a century ago. Any farmer can tell you how a fully-grown field of corn has a different microclimate than the land around it, that a field of corn is comparatively cool and wet, a result of the plant’s heavy perspiration. A corn plant will reach down 6-8 feet to pull up all the available moisture reserves that it needs during a hot Midwestern summer. I remember hearing a story by Jack Weaver, a livestock trader who grew up on an farm in northeast Kansas, describing how as a kid he would ride a minibike over a dirt road that crossed his family’s farm, how the fields of milo and of recently cut wheat would be hot and dry but then the blast of air would turn wet and cool like an ocean breeze when he would ride past a field of corn. If works kind of like a swamp cooler back in the old days before air conditioning, except that trying to swamp cool an entire region of the country makes for a big swamp that’s not very cool.

The advent of the “row crop” monoculture of corn and soybeans developed in the Midwest after World War II and didn’t come into full fruition until the 1970’s. Before that, Midwest farmers planted a lot of things, including lots of wheat and often a fair amount of vegetables, and many of them also kept cattle on their farms, with substantial amounts of land devoted to pasture and crops like clover and alfalfa. Both corn and soybeans suck up a lot more moisture than most of these other options, particularly during the months of July and August, and corn is the much more moisture intensive crop of the two.

But it took this year, where farmers planted a massive corn crop, responding to high prices this spring and the burgeoning demand of the ethanol industry, to grab the wider public’s attention. Anyone who has been outside in Chicago, or Des Moines, or De Kalb County, during the first week of August this year will vouch that the humidity has been oppressive bordering on surreal. It will be 88 degrees out, but it will feel like 100, and the dew still sits on the grass during a sunny, albeit hazy, day until 1 PM.

Corn is refashioning the Midwest ecosystem to suit its needs, making it warm and sticky, a greenhouse perfect for plants and mold but not so great for most forms of animal life, including human beings.

Tom Skilling noted on the weather page of the Aug 8 Chicago Tribune that 6,700 gallons of water transpirates from an acre of corn each day, and pointing to it as “a source of this air mass’ mugginess”, this understatement presumably an attempt not to overstep his bounds and upset any of the many corn farmers who follow his forecast each morning. But I will say it for him: the corn plant has dramatically altered the Midwest in many ways, including our weather.

I grew up in Orange County, California, which was dominated by another monoculture, namely oranges. As a kid, I remember driving through the hills to the south and the east of us, through the new towns of Tustin and El Modena, subdivisions just breaking ground, surrounded by acre after acre of citrus and avocado, the orange tree being king. As late as my mid-20’s, I remember walking up the rail tracks in Irvine, on the line which used to be the main artery for these orange groves, the last of the fruit warehouses still standing, although now abandoned and surrounded by multistory townhomes and a toney mall that had yet to open. I jimmied open the old warehouse door and walked through; pieces of old orange crates still littered the dirt floor.

When I was born in 1961, the population of Orange County stood at just over 100,000 souls; it had reached 1.9 million by the time I left high school in 1979. As a kid, I witnessed the shift of almost the entire county and its 789 square miles of land from farm to suburb, first the strawberries and the lima bean fields on the plains being paved over, then the orange and avocado groves up in the hills giving way. I look back on those orange groves as the landscape of a romantic past, never to return, as mankind crowded out the trees.

Except that my vision is a myth. Man didn’t destroy the orange groves; we created them. There were no orange trees in southern California until men meticulously planted them, and brought water down from the mountains to irrigate them, and built smudge pots at their base to protect their fruit from a December frost. Man planted row after myriad row of the bushy trees, ringing the groves with eucalyptus for protection from the wind, with a few palm trees at the front of the grove for show.

The native plant life of southern California is basically an inhospitable scrub, neither decorative nor edible. The orange groves of Orange County were planted by meticulous German immigrants at the turn of the previous century. My dad grew up in one of those German towns, known simply as Orange, in what at the time was an agricultural corner of Los Angeles County that had yet to secede from its more urban neighbor to the north.

Recently, my sister and I visited the old section of downtown Orange in honor of my dad, who passed away this year. We went to Watson’s Drugs and Soda Fountain, where my dad used to get root beer floats as a kid almost 80 years before. Afterwards, walking out on the plaza at the center of the old town, I looked out past the antique shops and the zoot suit clothier, taking in all four points of the compass on a warm January afternoon. I could imagine what it must have been like to grow up in Orange back then, the foothills on one side, the new orange groves spread out in a couple of directions, and Katella Avenue, a twenty-mile ribbon of fresh blacktop, as straight as any crow, heading out of town on its path to the Pacific.

When I moved to the Midwest, I was stunned by the endless expanse of corn, turning flat, empty fields into 8-foot tall grass prairies in the space of a few summer weeks. I was amazed at how a plant could so quickly transform the land. But these farms are no more natural than the orange groves of my youth. Both are a product of man, a temporary landscape until something that makes more money comes along. It makes them precious, in a way. Just as the orange groves of southern California have made way for tract homes, so the Midwestern Corn Belt will one day make room for something else. Both are fine creations of human ingenuity, as certain a proof of our nobility as a Laxness novel or a Beethoven symphony, as ephemeral in the scheme of things as any other created dream.