Farmers are the backbone of the nation.
I am not joking.
Oddly enough, I’m all in favor of farmers diversifying from corn, because frankly, we have so much corn that we are wasting a lot of it by making ethanol.
Plus, there are some missed opportunities, here. There are other crops, like Rye, Barley, Sorghum, Quinoa and Buckwheat (pseudocereals), Amaranth (pseudograin), Wild Rice (which isn’t rice), Millet and Teff, some of which could be grown in the corn belt region, others not. There are a lot of heritage wheats as well that are very different from common flour wheat.
Why grow these other foods? Because they could enlarge our cuisine with all sorts of tasty delicacies!
Right now, the less common ones that are available are mostly eaten by health nuts as unprocessed whole grains. But this is only because nobody has ever gotten around to producing much better tasting processed versions that could be incorporated into processed foods.
For example, most of the world eats a lot of millet, but the only kind grown in the US is as bird seed, not the kind humans eat.
By sticking almost entirely to corn and wheat, with some oats and a little barley, our cuisine is really deprived of hundreds of recipes of tasty stuff we would like to eat.