"Nonsense", really? and
James Fischer found:
1993: 62 million acres harvested
2013: 87.7 million acres harvested
The difference, about 100,000 sq km, is roughly the same area as the entire
island of Cuba!
With respect to "Nonsense", I was simply reporting what I've heard and observed over past 4 years in the main corn belt of the USA. I spent one summer traveling, surveying, and sampling corn areas of Indiana and Illinois, another summer in Nebraska, and I've examined alleged bee kills and bee kill (from dust) areas in Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota.
With respect to the corn acreage numbers - I got my numbers from national DOE meetings that I attended and from DOE reports. My sources in terms of corn acreage increase agree with what James Fischer reports above.
As per continuous corn - I got that term from the corn growers themselves, in all of the states in question. When we worked in Illinois and Indiana, we had a list of fields planted to treated corn. We then set up a route from west to east and sampled 23 fields. Of these, only 2 had anything other than corn within 1-2 miles. One had a potato field, the other a soybean field. I've Google Earth maps for every field sampled, including the surrounding fields. I've pollen samples for bee-collected pollen from all of those fields - I know what was around each and every field - and it was mostly corn.
If in the past year, soybeans have come back into play in Illinois, that's better than corn, corn, corn. Not much in terms of diverse bee flora, but better than just corn. (I'll admit, I wasn't in the corn belt last summer).
I've seen dandelions in bloom during planting of time in no till fields, also cover plants in bloom. I've pictures, if you doubt my observations.
Illinois was probably the worst state for mowing and use of herbicides to clear the margins of the fields of all that I visited and sampled. The sides of the roads were often devoid of anything that might bloom - it was like driving through canyons of corn. I'm not talking about every inch of Illinois, but in general, this applied to the majority of the corn areas that I sampled in the state. In the far eastern and western parts of the state, we found more small acreage farms, truck gardens, and riparian areas that were a bit more bee friendly. Western Indiana and Nebraska were also a bit better, although we found and photographed yellow margins along some of the corn fields in Nebraska - again from use of herbicides.
Finally as a former farmer and rancher, and as one of the first to plant and harvest field corn in Montana, I have to say that the most disheartening thing that I saw was in Illinois, where many of the barns were caving in - left to decay and rot. There's very little livestock left, and no use for barns (although I'd think dry storage and a sense of history might have come into play, but apparently not.
So, I stand by my statements. If continuous corn is on the wane, that's a step back toward reason. My comments were directed at the primary corn belt, and what I saw and heard there. I've been around farming for 68 years, having grown up on a farm. I was working full days in fields when I was 6 (driving tractors) - OSHA today would go nuts. So, my sense of agricultural history has a longer time period than many. I even remember farming with horses, although I can't say I did any of that, but I observed it. I was from the high tech generation, dad bought his first tractor the year I was born. He put me to driving at 5 because he couldn't yell Giddy Up and Whoa and get the tractor to start and stop.
Jerry
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