Movie review: King Corn

King Corn is documentary about economies of scale in agriculture and food. Two guys, fresh out ouf college, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, take off for Greene, Iowa. Why? To live their dream of growing one acre of corn in order to gain a greater understanding of agriculture and the food production system.

With help from local landowners, they successfully work through every step of raising corn, from seed purchase to harvest. Little do they know, that they will lose $19 dollars in the process...until they applyfor government subsidies, which brings them $21 dollars into the green: a first hand look at our tax dollars at work.

This movie is both entertaining and eye-opening. It investigates the economic benefits and dietary pitfalls of the use of corn as both an animal food and a sweetener. Along the way, their adventure raises questions about the economic and health benefits of our twenty-first century diet, and leaves the audience interested and curious about why we eat what we eat. The one big area in which King Corn falls short is solution proposition. I'm looking forward to watching the sequel, Big River. 

Alabama Disaster Relief

Thursday, at 3:45 AM, Chris, Ben, and I headed down to Ashville, AL to help with the disaster relief effort. After a few Loca Moca Monsters, we stopped at Chick-fil-a for some chicken biscuits. At 8:00 we arrived at the Boyds. The first people we saw when we got out of the truck were some friends that live 7 miles from us. It was strange to see somebody from home first thing. Anyway, we were redirected to the Crawford place where work was beginning to start for the day. After surveying the damage we went to work with our chainsaws. Log after log, limb after limb, we sawed and stacked until 6:00pm. The crew that was pulling up flooring from the remaining house structure were starting to look tired, so we helped them out until 7:30 when we packed up and hit the road...the road to Steak 'n Shake. Oh, yeah. A few Monsters and many miles later, we arrived home 12:15am...and we crashed.

 The Crawfords house used to sit on this foundation.

 And the chimney fell through the floor

 We also helped the Crawfords neighbor clean up his yard.

 Money doesn't grow on trees, but sheet metal might...

 This is a picture of one ridge of the valley...

 This is a picture of the ridge on the side of the valley most affected by the tornados. Aaron Crawford said this ridge looked like the one in the picture above before the tornado hit.

 He also said that the tornado passed in 45 seconds and was about a mile wide. Incredible.

 Many of the trees had rocks and grass embedded in the trunks.