Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food

Contents

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell:
The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food"

Written by George B. Pyle.
Published by Public Affairs Books, May, 2005.
Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-58648-115-5

"In Raising Less Corn, More Hell George Pyle shows us how the famous breadbasket of America is being bought up by large corporations, who produce less food per acre than the small farmer, push those farmers further into debt, pollute the earth and wear out the soil, and even license the very stuff of life: grain and seed. Meanwhile those farmers are promised a better future if they play ball with the corporations, but caught between the brutal new market and antiquated government support systems, they are forced to grow too much of the wrong crops – crops that will be fed to animals who cannot tolerate them, shipped as dubious ’aid’ to struggling countries, drive the farmer’s take–home pay ever downward, and make us all fatter."

"Pyle, native Kansan and [past] editorialist for the Salt Lake Tribune, delivers a powerful, learned and lively attack on the status quo and shows us how unless we take a close look at our larder — right now — we risk turning much of rural America into a permanent environmental and economic wasteland. We are feeding ourselves and the rest of the world too much trash, he says, at environmental, ecological, and even security costs that are too high to pay." (From the publisher.)

A Note from GEORGE B. PYLE: "After more than twenty years of committing journalism in Kansas, I was increasingly aware of the story I had not written. Agriculture, once the backbone of the state’s economy and center of its soul, was transforming before our eyes from the ideal of the independent family farmer to an industrial form of protein production. And very few people, even among those whose lives were being uprooted, seemed to think there was anything wrong with that. Certainly, there wasn’t any point in trying to stop it. It was progress. But there was a small but insistent chorus of voices in the background telling me that I was missing the story. Industrial food production, they warned, is not progress. It is endangering not only the rural way of life, but also the economy of the entire world, the ecology of our continent and the security of our nation. This book is an expression of how I found those voices to be the true ones, written, I hope, with the urgency of someone who has just discovered he’s wasted twenty years that should have been used to tell this story to the world."