Luke Hauge
5/5/2017
Will Jennings
RHET:1030:0004
Family Farming and the American Food Industry
How American’s have received our food and the way our food system has been run has
presented drastic changes over the last half century. One consistent component of our food
industry that has contributed throughout is the farmer. Farmers have always been a necessity in
our nation and in our communities, as they are the people who produce the nation’s food,
produce, and livestock. Without farmers, or people who took it as their job to produce food for
their community, each individual family would have to produce enough food on their own to
sustain themselves. Even if this were a possibility, this would be a lot of work and a very
inefficient use of everybody’s time, because people would have to spend more time trying to get
food and less time available for jobs and other activities.
The American agriculture system is the largest and most productive food system in the
world, and a very large amount of our production is geared towards corn. This is because corn
can be used for a lot of different things, from fueling your car to fueling your body. Iowa’s
farmers are the United States’, and therefore the worlds, largest and greatest producers of corn.
Iowa produced approximately 2.74 billion bushels of corn in 2016 alone (World of Corn). As a
nation, the efficiency of our corn production has risen dramatically as well, with only 73.1
