agriculture – Why do people produce corn and grains overall currently? Seems neither unsustainable nor profitable. Am I missing something? – GWC Mag

(apparently there is not an agriculture substack so I’m asking here)

I am researching homescale production of grains and vegetables and when it comes to grains in general I keep scratching my head because I see little reason to do so other than really liking to eat them.

Take maize: it is a huge eater of nutrients, so it needs plenty of fertilizers or rotating it with nitrogen fixating plants and at the end of the day is ridiculously cheap. A napkin calculation using market prices and yields(I take here a price of 250 USD / metric ton and ) and a standard productivity of 10.88 metric ton / ha leads to some meager 2712 USD per harvest per ha, well below minimum wage without even accounting the costs. I’ve done calculations with some other grains and results are not much better.

Although I know there can be self-sufficiency reasons for it, those do not apply to current industrial agriculture which only cares about the profits. I’m no professional farmer and am not pretending to give advice to them but, as far as I can see, even for selfish economic reasons it seems that abandoning a lot of farming land wasted on grains makes the most sense.

Is there a hidden reason why grains are produced so much that I’m not seeing it?