Corn System
Each year close to nine billion bushels of corn are harvested from Midwestern farms. This astounding volume of grain is the source of a complex system of production, trading, processing, transport, and consumption that carries the product of Midwestern soils literally around the world. This same process carries Midwestern soils and fertilizers into the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the "dead zone" of the Gulf of Mexico.
The goal of Sustainability Institute's Corn System Project is to provide tools and resources to help the participants in the corn-based economy take a long-range look at their entire system — from producers through processors to consumers — with the purpose of finding ways to make the system function more positively for all its participants.
Resources
- The Corn System Project: Defining an Economically and Ecologically Sustainable Commodity Corn System (Interim Report — 25 January, 2000) HTML or RTF (274k)
Contacts
Our partner in this endeavor is The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.