The urgency of transforming the Midwestern U.S. landscape into more than corn and soybean

Abstract

The current agri-food system emerged out of a desire to provide an inexpensive and secure food supply. Yet even before COVID-19, the abundant agricultural production of the Midwestern United States was generated amid a backdrop of increasing farm bankruptcies, declining farm employment and rural communities, and climbing farmer suicide rates. The environmental costs of this system were well established and include Gulf of Mexico hypoxia, elevated sediment and nutrient levels in waterways, and impacts to air quality, biodiversity and climate change. The economic, social and environmental consequences of contemporary agriculture already indicated the need for a wholesale revisiting of the dominant agricultural paradigm of highly specialized and subsidized production.