If you drive through the flat territories of Illinois, Indiana, or Iowa—US states that form the center of a region known as the “corn belt”—you are almost certainly going to be surrounded by vast rows of corn and soybeans for much of the time. On the ground, stalks of corn create eight-foot-tall corridors along state and county roads from mid-summer through the fall. Throughout the summer, the much shorter, and leafy, soybean plants resemble a vast, green shag carpet that extends to the horizon. […] Without knowing much about these crops, it’s possible to imagine yourself in a bucolic territory of agrarian splendor; a Grant Wood painting come to life. As you drive through endless corn corridors and soy carpets, you might be awed by their horizontal reach and scale—an endless expanse of a single substance, like the ocean. Considering the sheer energy and power needed to plant and harvest these fields, year after year, you might experience something like the sublime. But, with more historical and material knowledge, standing on the edge of a field planted with corn or soy can resemble the experience of standing on the edge of an open-pit mine. This story begins by leaping from the edge of the mine, into the pit.

This text draws on a body of work collectively titled A Great Green Desert, by Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, that documents the social and ecological impacts of extractive, mono-crop agriculture in the US Midwest and Central Brazil.

Extract from Ryan Griffis, “A Great Green Desert: Into the Pit,” Deep Time Chicago Pamphlet Series, 2018.