“You find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food,” – (pg 46)
Pollan looks at agriculture in the first few chapters of this book by revealing corns’ link to the industry of petroleum and war. He quotes farm activists who say “We’re still eating the leftovers from World War II.” (pg 41) The beef we eat, the soda we drink, and just about anything else comes from corn, and thus comes from petroleum. “More then half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.” (pg 45) What makes me sick is the idea that the fertilizer my food is grown in spawned from the invention of a toxic death gas used in a World War. There is no doubt in my mind why some one would want to cover up the history of Ammonium Nitrate and its inventor Fritz Haber. His story is not one you would want to hear about in the supermarket grocery store aisle.
In the case of meat it seems ridicules to convert corn into beef, which has a conversion ratio of thirty two pounds of corn feed into four pounds of muscle, fat and bone (pg 80). The corn that came from synthetic nitrogen in this case gets released from the cows as manure. But this manure can’t be used as fertilizer because it is too rich in nitrogen and will burn the plants. This makes agriculture even more dependent on petroleum as a source of fertilizer.
A seemingly more foolish idea is to convert corn into ethanol. With the amount of petroleum it takes to grow corn one would think that the idea of turning corn back into a burnable fuel seems ludicrous, especially when nitrogen rich fertilizer tends to run off and leave the fields bare and in need of more petroleum.
In conclusion I think that agricultural based on petroleum is an agricultural system based on short cuts and waste.