Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case For The Independent Farm And Against Industrial Food

Raising Less Corn, More Hell is George Pyle's revelatory, alarming, and fiercely witty essay on the many wrong ways in which our food is produced, what it all means, and what can be done about it. Pyle shows us how the famous breadbasket of America is increasingly controlled by large corporations who produce less food per acre that 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 independent 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 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, economic, and even security costs that are too high to pay.