Soybean set stage for deadly superbugs
AMERICA has too much, and it’s killing us.
There are too many pesticides sprayed on too much corn and soy, fed to too many farm animals. With too many antibiotics, the animals grow too fast in too little space.
The modern US food system’s abundance problem has led to a scarcity problem. Fewer breeds of livestock and crops-their genetics controlled by a handful of companies- and the overuse of antibiotics leave consumers with scant choice and doctors with fewer and fewer drugs left to fight the superbugs we’ve created.
How on earth did we get here? Henry Ford and the soybean.
Two books out this month paint a fascinating picture of how government and industry helped consumers and farmers in the short term but left Americans today with a world of ills. “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm” ( W.W. Norton & Co.), by Ted Genoways, follows a multi- generational farm family in Nebraska from harvest to harvest, flashing back to the pivotal moments in history that paved the way there. Maryn McKenna’s “Big Chicken” ( National Geographic) shows how adding antibiotics to chicken feed after World War II brought cheap protein to the table and a fast- growing public health crisis- antibiotic resistance-to the world.
Soy is now an integral part of the US food system, but its beginnings had nothing to do with food. Soybeans were grown as a possible answer to the looming petroleum shortage of the early 20th century. And their biggest initial booster wasn’t a food company but, as Genoways lays it out, Ford.
In the late 1920s, America was overrun with grain, leaving farmers wondering what they would do with it all. A piece titled “Wanted: Machines to Eat Up Our Crop Surplus” appeared in the magazine Farm & Fireside in 1927, suggesting that perhaps the government could fund research into turning those grains into industrial products.
Ford liked the idea. He relied on petroleum both to build his cars and to power them. And the plan, if enacted, could create more demand for his farm equipment, the same gear that helped create the grain glut in the first place. He just didn’t want government driving this economic overhaul. He wanted to do it himself. Ford expanded his company’s agricultural laboratory and directly oversaw new efforts to turn plants into plastics and biofuels. After the 1929 stock market crash, the US Department of Agriculture looked to the world to find new crops to save farmers.
From China, William J. Morse, a USDA scientist long interested in soybeans, collected thousands of varieties for US researchers. Ford got wind of the project and instructed his team to take a closer look. They found that the soybean could produce lubricants and plastics, as well as oils and a high-protein meal.
That’s when things started moving really fast for the multitalented bean.
In 1931, Ford poured a million dollars into research and stopped looking at those other, disappointing plants. The following spring, 300 varieties were being cultivated on 8,000 acres in rural Michigan; the year after that, some 12,000 acres.
Soon farmers were planting 35,000 acres of soybeans. Ford was buying it all, and selling it, too-he offered soy-based baked goods and ice cream at the company commissary and, while hosting an American Soybean Association convention, said he could see a time when cars “could be made from by-products of agriculture.”
The Ford machine churned up a booming market in soy for the American farmer.
In the summer of 1934, during a major drought that killed corn and wheat, soy prevailed against linseed and canola, with a harvest of 23 million bushels. The next year it reached about 70 million bushels; by decade’s end, nearly 100 million bushels were harvested.
During the worst of the Great Depression, Genoways writes, soybeans were bringing in more money for farmers than barley and rye.
It was too good to last. In 1938, a giant oil reserve was discovered in Saudi Arabia, and the need for cheap alternatives to petroleum all but vanished.
Luckily, that drought- driven decline in the harvest of grains gave soybeans new life as livestock feed.
That brought its own challenges, as McKenna explains in her book about the rise of antibiotics in agriculture. While the demand for protein to feed American soldiers in World War II helped nearly triple chicken production, the industry quickly lost its guaranteed market at the end of the war and found itself with more birds than it could sell. Suddenly, the industry’s feed supply, fishmeal, was too expensive.
Soybeans weren’t. The problem was that, with soy as feed, the birds weren’t growing as fast. “People talked about needing to add a nutritious boost,” McKenna writes, “an ‘ animal protein factor.’ “
At Merck & Co., researchers had discovered that a byproduct of making the streptomycin antibiotic, which began with manured soil as a raw material, could be fed to chickens to fatten them up. In 1948, a rival company, Lederle Laboratories, was doing the same with a byproduct of one of its own antibiotics, Aureomycin.
Meanwhile, the industry was moving chickens indoors, their lives now bereft of such natural foods as insects, not to mention sunlight. The antibiotics helped smooth this transition, actually altering the animals’ metabolism to help them adjust to their new, unnatural life. Lederle announced its results in 1950, and the industry was all in. By 1955, American farmers were giving animals nearly half a million pounds of antibiotics a year.
Some had been raising the alarm about frightening consequences. As early as 1945, Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, was quoted in the New York Times warning that using doses that were too low to wipe out infections, as was common practice in agriculture, could lead to the evolution of more resistant microbes.
By 1955, this was already happening. A penicillin-resistant strain of the staphylococcus bacterium that travelled from Australia to the US had infected more than 5,000 mothers and their newborns near Seattle. Lederle’s own veterinarians, McKenna reports, had issued warnings that sales of Aureomycin as a growth promoter could lead to antibiotic resistance.
Today, about 80 per cent of the antibiotics produced in the US are fed to farm animals, and the United Nations has called antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health.” — WP-Bloomberg