Corn is a rare C-4 plant which means that it takes more carbon from the air than other plants which are generally C-3 plants. This means it grows more efficient. A smaller area is needed to grow more calories. Corn though also then needs more fertilizer then the usual.

Fritz Haber invented the process by which nitrogen is taken from it's gaseous form N2 and split and combined with hydrogen whereby it can be used for bombs and also for fertilizer. Along with making bombs Haber made poisonous gases to be used in WWI for Germany. Haber's wife committed suicide apparently in horror at what he was doing but he continued to be quite proud of the contribution he had made to the war effort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

His process takes nitrogen gas and hydrogen and puts the two together using very high heat and pressure which is produced using electricity. The hydrogen is taken from fossil fuels. Oil, coal and most usually natural gas. Before Haber's process fertilizer only came naturally from bacteria feeding off the roots of legumes and from lightning. (Surely not just legumes??) Thanks to Haber's process produce yields have exploded. And the population of the world has exploded. How will we continue to feed all the people when we run out of fossil fuels?

The crop which has benefited the most from Haber's synthetic nitrogen is corn. Along with using more carbon corn also uses more nitrogen and as a result of synthetic nitrogen, corn is now an extremely cheap crop. Made even cheaper by government subsidies.

Without government subsidies, corn simply costs more than can be made selling it, despite how cheap it is. Why exactly is this? It's not entirely clear to me. It seems that the farms which grow corn are just stuck. It's the only thing they know how to grow anymore (they had to grow only it in massive quantities in order to survive) and so instead of growing something else that could sell better, they try to grow more and more corn in order to make enough money to now continue surviving. And some continue to survive (or they don't and the land gets bought up into fewer and fewer and larger and larger farms) because they receive just enough government subsidies to do so.

Why the subsidy?

It does make sense to buy up and store excess food for emergency. Much better than seeing periodic famine hitting your country. This was the main original reason. But things have twisted now. Now the incredibly cheap subsidized corn is ultimately bought by Cargill, one of the most powerful corporations in the world. And because the corn is now so incredibly cheap, it's used for a ton of things it otherwise wouldn't be used for. Again, though, it's the subsidies in part which made it so cheap in the first place... But still it would probably be the cheapest thing all the same... And the idea of the subsidies was originally related to an emergency store in times of famine, etc.

But now it's being used for factory farming. Cows are fed a diet that is 75% corn for 5 months to very quickly fatten them. If instead they were left to eat grass it would take 3 to 5 years. Instead they eat this corn which their bodies can't really handle. Their guts become too acidic and so they receive a constant supply of antibiotics as otherwise they'll simply die before they can get suffciently fattened.

Using antibiotics in such a manner causes bugs to develop resistance to antibiotics.

The cows are also feed cow fat and cow blood. Before 1997 they were fed basically everything from other diseased cows. This led to mad cow disease. Still today cows are fed cow fat and cow blood. Still today other animals (chickens, pigs, etc) are fed whole rendered cows.

Does all of this make meat cheaper for Americans?

Yes, definitely. By subsidizing corn, (60% of which is fed to animals) meat is made cheaper for Americans. There are actually people who (mistakenly) think being vegan is more expensive than eating meat thanks in large part to such subsidies.

Just how sick is the system when such ideas are common?

So meat is cheaper. So we're developing bugs that are resistant to antibiotics.

On the old traditional farm, the manure from the live stock was used to fertilize future crops. Now in the animal factory farm you have shit everywhere. In fact if you drive through the towns near where these places are in the midwest, you can smell the shit for miles and miles. (I've have personally done so. It's beyond me to live like that.) It's disgusting and all that shit isn't used for anything now. Not used for fertilizer (we just use synthetic fertilizer instead which requires fossil fuels). This animal shit is filled with antibiotics anyway. And it pollutes everything. The run off goes everywhere. Asthma in children continues to rise. And it runs down into the Mississippi and then out into the Gulf of Mexico where there's a 8000 square mile zone so starved of oxygen nothing but algae can live in it.

The average factory cow consumes/uses 35 gallows of oil in it's lifetime.

One of the problems which happens to cows fed corn is excessive gas. To the point it presses on their lungs and they suffocate. The solution is forcing a tube down their throats to get out the gas.

The only reason we feed corn to our animals we're planning on murdering and eating, is that it's basically the cheapest food per calorie that we've got. We also then of course have looked for as many other uses for it as possible and so it's everywhere else in our foods.

The reason it's not the "war machine food' is that it was only developed to this level (the massive size it now is) just in the last couple of thousand years, while grain and rice were well developed 10,000 years ago. The extra 5000+ years meant that those lucky humans had a lot more time to develop their bureacracies and invent guns, etc with which to kill Native Americans and Africans, etc.

...what else? In 1975, the amount of corn and soy fed just to America's cows, was enough to have fed the population of both India and China.

Trying to summarize this in my head a bit:

Originally a cow on a farm eating grass. It's manure is used to fertilize the other crops being grown there.

Now, instead, that cow is fed corn. Because the corn is incredibly cheap in large part thanks to synthetic fertilizer made from fossil fuels which we're running out of. The corn makes the cows sick and antibiotics (along with hormones, etc) are put in the feed. Super-resistant bugs are bred. Not even to begin to mention corn fed cows are apparently far less healthy to eat, lower levels of omega 3's, etc.

And instead of that cow out grazing in a pasture. It's crowded in a shit infested hellhole basically. The shit that previously was used as fertilizer now just polluting the environment.

And thus meat is cheaper.
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Mostly unrelated I accidentally ate a potato chip that contained chicken fat in it last night. I ate one single chip and immediately noticed it tasted... funny. Funny in a bad way. A real bad way. And right there on the list of ingredients: chicken fat. Effing disgusting. And you see, I can taste chicken. I wonder how much is just in my head... I could never eat eggs because... they always tasted just like chickens to me... I asked other people if they noticed this. No one, it seems, did.
I can't explain it really. It is like the essence of the creature somehow is there. And it's awful. It's not my overwhelming love for chickens. It's just an awful thing to be putting into my body. Making my body into.

Once a roomate gave me a bag of meat jerky, long before I was vegan. I took a bite and immediately thought... it tastes very strange indeed. Cobweb like. Some creature that hides in shadows... My friend had just gotten back from Mexico and it was indeed tarantula jerky, which is certainly no more disgusting than chicken fat in a potato chip.

I gave the bag of chips to my work colleagues who all later reported stomach aches. Ugh. How can anyone eat chicken.

Michael Pollan says that 'eating industrial meat takes an almost herioc act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.'

I'm reading this book for a book group. This book isn't actually advocating even vegetarianism by the way. Will be interested what the reaction will be of the meat eaters in the group. A herioc act of forgetting. Pretty much all of life is already exactly that.