Skid Roche

From Techyum:

King Corn is a documentary opening Nov. 2 in San Francisco and Berkeley, and throughout November nationwide (it already played in New York, Washington, DC and Boston). Directed by Aaron Woolf, King Corn follows Ian Cheney and Curtis Ellis, two Yale friends who discover that their great-grandfathers came from the same small town in Iowa. They decide to move to Greene, Iowa to spend a year farming an acre of corn and make a documentary about it, in the process exploring the powerful but largely unseen role corn has in American life.

Raising an acre of corn — a ludicrously small amount in this age of a farm industry dominated by big companies — requires them to learn from a host of earthy characters, which is all very entertaining, but the science facts of the documentary are what’s really interesting. For example, 150 pounds of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer allows their one acre to grow more than four times the corn their great-grandparents could grow on the same acre. Using modern machinery, in 18 minutes they plant 31,000 kernels of Liberty Link transgenic corn. Why is it significant what brand of corn they plant? Because when weeds show up, our charming college-boy farmers use Liberty brand herbicide. Using the herbicide on non-Liberty Link corn will kill the corn.

Read the rest of my review at Techyum.