Like many farmers across Illinois, author Sophia Beem’s grandparents rely on corn as one of their staple crops. All photos courtesy of Sophia Beem
By Sophia Beem
As a kid I ran among the corn with my cousins, green stalks rough against our red elbows. We played until we were tired and sweaty and ate ice cream that Grandma scooped for us out of a gallon plastic tub, which would later be used for scraps to feed the chickens. In my grandparents’ house I slept on the couch under a scratchy wool blanket. I watched out the big window beyond the trees and Grandma’s vegetable garden and the rows of corn swaying in the moonlight. My grandpa always woke up first, tending to his farm with a devotion that was as much reverence as routine. To him, the land wasn’t just a place. “A farmer has to care for the ground,” he always said. He worked, we played, the fields were whole and green and coarse. The corn was steady. My cousins grew up and learned how to tend the corn and the land, while to me, living in the city, it was always just a childhood memory of tag.
Now, I approach the farmhouse from the road, its white siding visible against the blue horizon. There’s a weight in the air here that feels tied to more than just the soil and stalks — it’s tied to a legacy of stewardship that runs through my family. This is the stewardship that I have never known in that same way. It smells of tilled soil and the sweetness of ripening crops. As I park the car and step out, I can see Grandpa up ahead, his familiar, steady gait, his silhouette framed against the corn that he knows so well, each season, each yield, a testament to his bond with the land and the generations of my family who have known it. The cornfields are still steady and unchanging, but they no longer feel untouched. The legacy I once took for granted is more fragile than I realized, a tension between tradition and change that I’ve only just begun to understand.
My grandparents live and work on a farm in Western Illinois of about 100 acres, a modest portion of the state’s agricultural tapestry. Illinois has 27 million acres of farmland, making up 75% of the state’s total land area. My grandparents rotate corn, soybeans, and pasture ground for the cattle livestock on their acreage. Corn is a constant — it always has been. “Corn to me is a good crop because you plant it and you spray it and you get it right, it’s an easy crop to grow, easy to harvest,” my grandpa says. Most of the corn he grows is used to feed his cattle in a self-sufficient loop of production. My grandparents display this resourcefulness in many ways: growing their own fruits and vegetables, collecting fresh eggs from their wire chicken coop, reusing all plastic containers, and mending their own clothes. They are always finding ways to repurpose bibs and bobs, but when there is surplus corn crop to sell, its fate becomes a mystery. They take it to Meredosia on the Illinois River. “We don’t have any idea where it goes after we sell it,” Grandpa says. This is the nature of the industry.
Corn is a global commodity, with prices rising and falling based on exports, weather, and demand. The economics of it all, the prices and the selling rates, are no strangers to my grandparents, with unpredictability one of the constants of farming. Still, the intricacies of subsidies and international trade feel distant compared to the immediacy of tending their fields. “If you have a good crop and have something to sell, that helps, too,” Grandpa says, a simple truth that has echoed across the generations.
That said, the importance of buying and selling has shifted over my grandparents’ lifetimes. Since World War II, the U.S. Corn Belt has been transformed by large-scale, industrialized farming. This has been mainly focused on corn and soybean monocultures. This system has boosted crop yields and driven economic output — but at a cost. The tallgrass prairies that once dotted the region have given way to uniform fields, the land homogenized, the diversity of the land and the farms shifted to a highly specialized, productivist approach.
A recent study by Ben Leitschuh, William P. Stewart, and Carena J. van Riper introduces the concept of the “good farmer” as a framework for understanding how these systems fit with local community identity. Conducted through the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the U. of I., their research highlights how this “good farmer” identity includes a sense of place-making, land stewardship, and farm viability beyond mere profit. As my grandpa says, “A good farmer has to care for the ground, firstly.” There’s a level of dedication to the earth itself that is manifested in the daily toil of the job. “You got to want to till it, got to want to treat it right, got to want to put in the right fertilizer.”
When I ask Grandpa about his experiences in agriculture, I learn just how this rhythm is etched into his daily life. He’s a fourth-generation Illinois farmer. He started milking cows before sunrise when he was just six years old. His dad kept about 40 cows and the kids milked them morning and night. Back then, their farm consisted of a cycle of cows, corn, and hay. As a kid, my grandpa worked the farm two hours in the morning and two hours at night after school, and there was always something to do on Saturday. That is the life he’s always known.
Beem and her brother, ages 6 and 4, in an Illinois corn maze.
I didn’t grow up on a farm like my parents and grandparents did, but living in Central Illinois means that corn was always nearby. Every year I played in a local 3v3 soccer tournament at the Chatham Sweet Corn Festival. Always falling on the hottest weekend of the year in late July, the small-town festival had vendors and food and live music. Apple juice pouches were passed out at sponsored booths at the soccer fields, and parents would set up camp in patches of shade with coolers and canvas camp chairs. Each year I knew the sun might make me sick — someone invariably threw up from the pounding heat — but I still looked forward to the steaming ear of buttered sweet corn I got to eat after the games. This festival was more than just a few days of food and soccer. It was a celebration of identity, showcasing how this crop is a symbol of local pride and connection to the land. Illinois runs on homegrown corn.
Yet, sweet corn is just a tiny parcel of a vast industry. It’s a variant species, less than 1% of the annual harvest in Illinois, picked early before the extra sugar has a chance to turn into starch. Field corn, the dominant crop, isn’t the stuff you eat off the cob at festivals. It’s destined for livestock feed, ethanol, and processed foods. Sweet corn is representative of the local farmer, the plot of crop in the backyard, not the industrial beast that corn is today. Corn, whether it be sweet corn or field corn, has a conflicting place in Illinois identity. It’s both a cultural touchstone and a cornerstone of big agriculture.
This duality reflects a growing tension. The historical context of Illinois agriculture reveals a significant shift from small, family-run farms to large-scale, mechanized operations focused on maximizing yield and profit. According to Leitschuh et al., this transition from small to big agriculture has resulted in “massive farm consolidations, soaring farmland prices, population decline in rural communities, and families coping with the loss of land and livelihoods that had been passed down for generations.” The corn is reshaping rural life. “A lot of the trees are gone,” my grandma tells me, reflecting on the area in West Central Illinois where she was raised and where she raised her children. “It’s all big fields now.” This evolution of Illinois agriculture from small, family-run operations to expansive industrial farms has reshaped not just the land, but also the identities of those who work it. For my grandparents, farming is more than a livelihood — it’s a legacy.
Corn has a paradoxical dominance in the “good farmer” framework. Corn receives the highest level of federal subsidies, yet most of it is not directly edible and instead feeds industrial processes, like biofuels and livestock feed. This seems at odds with the “good farmer” identity of legacy and farm-to-table. Growing corn is resource-intensive, requiring large amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. The cost of corn seed has just about doubled in the past three years. There are endless layers to peel back, like the husk of an ear of corn, layers to the place-making of corn in the state. An Illinois farmer with thousands of acres of corn may struggle to produce food without substantial processing, highlighting yet another conflict in how this crop is supported and exists within the history and heritage of Illinois.
“You’re gonna get rain or you ain’t gonna get rain,” Grandpa says. “The weeds are gonna come up or not. After you put it in the ground, it’s up to God until you take it out.” This balance of control and surrender defines the mindset of many farmers. The “good farmer” understands that stewardship doesn’t mean mastery — it means humility, working with nature rather than against it.
This fabric has frayed in recent years. This isn’t the same land where generations have raised their children. Grandma says that people living nearby who’ve recently bought farms are usually hunters with other income sources or absentee owners. They buy land and have someone else farm it and use it for weekend getaways during deer season. Along the way, farmers’ connection with nature drifts from its roots. Livestock farming is turning more and more to confinement-based methods. Grandpa says it’s hard to find a farmer with pigs that live outside. First this shift happened with chickens, then pigs, and now the trajectory for cattle looks similar.
This shift isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about economics. Most people can’t afford to put up these facilities, so the big hog operations finance them. “They come out, put a fancy hog farm in your place, and you have so many years to pay it back and manage the facility,” Grandma explains. These transitions strip away independence and deepen reliance on industrial systems. And at the center of it all is corn — the crop that feeds these confined animals, fuels biofuel production, and defines much of Illinois’ agricultural identity.
The environmental implications of industrial corn farming are significant and complex. Research reveals the detrimental impacts of monoculture practices, including soil degradation, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Corn’s water footprint is immense. Its carbon footprint is equally staggering. The inputs required for industrial corn production — such as nitrogen fertilizers and synthetic pesticides — are derived from fossil fuels, contributing heavily to greenhouse gas emissions.
The reliance on corn extends beyond the crop itself, transforming livestock farming. Subsidies from the Green Revolution, taking place from the 1940s to the 1980s, made feed grains like corn inexpensive, incentivizing a shift from open-range grazing to confined feedlots. Over the past century, the diet of cattle has shifted from grass to 90% corn and soy. While this system maximizes output, it has significant downsides. Animal waste, once a valuable fertilizer, now accumulates without purpose. These large-scale industrial practices threaten the fabric of local communities that events like the Sweet Corn Festival aim to celebrate.
“We’re the oldest people in this area,” Grandma says, looking out at the fields. “When we started farming, it was all small family farmers, but everybody could make a living. Now they’ve combined all these farms.” But they couldn’t, really. Grandpa worked for decades in a warehouse managing shipments and my grandma worked at the local Farm Extension office when my mom and her siblings were growing up. Maybe my grandparents remember a time when a family could support themselves with a small farm, but this hasn’t been possible for many years. They worked to be able to pay the bills; they worked to be able to farm.
My grandparents’ lives, their histories in farming, and their devotion to their land now in retirement raise a fundamental question: Can we reconcile the economic demands of modern agriculture with the preservation of cultural heritage and environmental sustainability? The answer isn’t clear. Outsiders may perceive farmers merely as contributors to an industrial system of agriculture. As we ponder the question of preservation and environmental awareness, it becomes evident that Illinois must find ways to better protect its family farming while balancing modern economic and environmental pressures. These small farmers might not fully recognize the environmental impact of their practice, but the reverence and sense of responsibility is always there.
Despite the challenges, farming has always been about more than just the crops. It’s about the relationships, the shared knowledge, and the sense of community that sustain rural life. My grandpa’s stories, often rambling and peppered with names I don’t know but are somehow familiar to all 12 of my aunts and uncles, reveal this tight web. I always assumed my mom didn’t really know her neighbors growing up. Playing on Grandpa’s farm in the middle of nowhere as a kid, any other home always seemed so far away. But the connection is apparent in my grandpa’s roundabout stories: “I was out getting weeds out of the fence-line. Ann came out with a glass of water, give me the water. Brought me out a roll of deer salami, her brother was in Jackie’s class, named T-Bone. T-Bone lives in Payson now, was driving truck for a while…” This kind of reciprocity — the gossip, the trade of information and food and water, the lively chatter — is a big part of farming communities. It’s not just about survival, though survival often depends on it; it’s about connection. These relationships forged over borrowed tools and shared meals form a network that stretches across fields and gardens and weathered front porches. These relationships are worth saving.
Now, as I walk along the fields when I visit my family, corn stretches out beneath a sky that feels both infinite and intimate, a place that has always known me. I think of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my parents, of the land that holds their stories and their work — of a way of life that has always been about more than the crops in the ground. It’s about roots, not just in the soil. Grandpa tells me why, after all these years, he gets up and tends to the land everyday: “It’s just something… to farm you have to enjoy doing it. You have to enjoy seeing the changes. Harvesting the crop. That’s the satisfaction of it. I love it. I grew up with it. I didn’t realize when I was young that I would be a farmer. It came with me.”
Among all the faceless corporations and ever-expanding urban sprawl, local farming communities, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, the Sweet Corn Festival, my grandpa’s corn field, are a reminder of what we risk losing.
And yet, like so many other urban and suburban people with farming roots, these traditions seem far from my reach. I could not tell how the turns of the weather will green the crop. My fingers tap the plastic keypad of my laptop; they don’t dig the soft soil. In Central Illinois, the days get hotter and the livestock are increasingly crowded indoors. Corn sucks up resources even as it provides vital income. It’s a quiet kind of loss — the one I feel when I stand on the edge of the field, or seated inside with my family as they chatter about tractors and prices and harvest schedules — knowing that the life my family has built for generations is slipping through my fingers and theirs, even as it remains rooted in the land.
About the Author …
Sophia Beem is a junior from Springfield, Ill. studying Creative Writing and Global Studies with a minor in German. She is pursuing the Certificate in Environmental Writing and is a Communications Intern for iSEE. Sophia is involved with campus environmental organizing as the Editor-in-Chief of the Green Observer.
This piece was written for ESE 477, Advanced Environmental Writing, in Fall 2024.