Peter Zeihan is an interesting guy - he manages to be even more gloomy than me, while being relentlessly upbeat and occasionally even chirpy about it.
Trump’s trade war puts us in the same situation as the guy sitting in the drunk tank with a hangover, pondering how to unbeat his wife. We did it, no escape from that, and now nobody who needs say … FOOD … is gonna trust us roughly as far as they can throw a bushel of GMO corn.
Two years ago in Change Partners in the Climate Catastrophe section I paused to fret over the implications of losing all major rivers. The rate of decline stopped, but for the U.S. it’s now a chronic problem. The Mississippi runs low each fall, just when we need it most for the massive harvest in the upper Midwest.
There are things about this only an Iowa farm boy would know. When the harvest is a real “bin buster”, we’ll “ground store” corn. Every grain elevator has a massive paved area where an excess of corn will get piled. The lined angular area at top center is a concrete pad, the stuff at the top are concrete barriers to keep the corn from spilling onto the road. A 40’ to 50’ pile there over the winter months is not unusual.
This year our entire soy crop is unsold due to trade war and that means all corn on the ground as we store it over winter. ChatGPT thinks you can pile soy, but you can’t prove it by me - I’ve never seen it done. When it’s being harvested farmers are racing to beat the fall rains. If you have to put soy on the ground for more than a week, you might as well leave it rot in the field as fertilizer for next year.
Bonus Imagery:
These are from a photo essay I did in 2007 and my travels in 2008.
This is that elevator from the ground. See the braced tube on the right with the lattice legs? That’s the spout that dumps corn into the center of the pile area. The towers at the right are the original elevator from the 1960s. The two small dark towers in the center are natural gas powered grain dryers. All of the other large bins you see were added some time after the mid-1980s, I don’t remember them from my childhood.
This is the view from the other side taken in the fall of 2007. Notice there’s only one steel bin on the right and the two shorter ones are not yet built to the last. The tubes sticking out of the side of the three groups of concrete towers are for loading grain cars.
And yours truly, checking conditions in a farm storage bin. This was 2008, when I helped a friend with the harvest that year.
There was ONE tree in the whole field. And yet I managed to hit it. No harm done, but back to the farm in order to remount the John Deere corn head (green) on this International Harvester combine (red). Didn’t know you could mod this like, didja?
Your point about the trade war and unsold soy crop really underscores how interconnected everything is for companies like Deere. When farmers can't export their crops, they have no cash flow, and when they have no cash flow they're not buying new equipmnt or upgrading. The whole precision ag technology that Deere has been pushing only works if farmers are making money and can justify the investment. And now with the Mississippi River issues on top of trade uncertainty, you've got this perfect storm where farmers are just trying to survive rather than invest in better gear. The John Deere corn head detail in your story is a nice reminder that this equipment is designed to last decades if maintained properly, which is great for farmers but tuff for Deere's buisness model when nobody's buying new stuff. Really insightful piece.
Glory days