Grist had an interesting article last week called the The Myth of Grass-Fed Beef. It quoted President Bush stating one of the problems that modern agriculture has with ethanol made from corn, specifically that ethanol production will raise the cost of corn making it harder for farmers to feed their chickens, cattle, and swine.

Number 2 corn in all of it's varieties is a convenient way of feeding animals. You or somebody else grows the corn, you store it in great big piles. You don't have to worry as much about methane building up, creating liability and toxic hazards for workers, and you don't have to worry about fires breaking out from rotting green hay. And you can bring the feed right to the animals.

The advantages are obvious. If you can bring corn in big trucks to the cows then you have cows almost anywhere and of any density, assuming you can figure what to do with the manure and keep the farm run-off low enough to keep the water quality people happy. Farming on corn means that farming can exist essentially detached from the land. A farm fed on corn could theoretically be located in an urban area if not for the environmental impacts that would discourage farms from locating populated areas.

Moreover, beef from confined cows tastes better as it gives the cow a greater opportunity to get fat rather then get tough muscle. People like their steaks soft so they can cut them with a butter knife, and the fatty beef tastes good. Milk from grass fed heifers tends to very in quality, and can be more sour tasting in the spring as cows are fed green hay and grass with different neutrants then dried and chopped hay, alfalfa, or corn.

On the other hand, the impacts of this kind of farming are well known to have some major side effects. When you break the farm off of the land, and instead compartmentalize it like the rest of the industrial system, you start having to deal with not only inputs and energy to a greater extent but also outputs and waste.

On the inputs side, you have to get corn from a farm field. Corn takes a lot of energy to plant, fertilize and grow, then cut up and haul to the farm. Not to mention it's expensive to grow except for big government subsidies. Corn is far more acidic then hay and alfalfa, which can make cows sick particularly in higher feed rations. That means mixing antibiotics in the feed to keep them marginally healthy.

On the outputs side, you end up with a more desired product a bit a lower quality that has a significant environmental impacts. You have all that manure to deal with, that can again make the cows very sick if they are standing in it. Foot rot is one of many problems to deal with when the cows can't get out and forge and spread their manure around more naturally.

And when manure collected, it has to be disposed of or utilized. Without the corn and hay being grown on the farm there is no place for the manure to be utilized. Moreover, spreading manure with largely corn fed cows can be problematic, as the manure has far more bacteria is less desirable on the fields. To say nothing of antibiotics and other chemicals from the mass processing of cattle ending up in the manure – manure from large CAFOs is more like sewage sludge, and indeed in many cases is landfilled and never re-applied to fields. Instead, fertilizer from petroleum is used.

Regardless of the impacts, corn is the way most of our meat and to a lesser extent milk is produced in our country. It allows for larger farms raising more cattle, that makes them more competitive in an overly competitive market that currently exists for commodities like milk and beef today. Farming on corn requires much less labor even if it requires much more energy and resources. But it has a negative impact on the land.