2633: The Town that Ate its Seed Corn: EVERYTHING Compounds

LifeBlood: There was once a prosperous farming town with a peculiar tradition: every harvest, they took some of their very best corn and locked it away. They called it seed corn. Then someone asked a perfectly reasonable question: Why are we keeping perfectly good food in a barn when people could eat it today? So they ate some. Nothing bad happened. In fact, things got better. Until decades later, when the town found itself facing a mysterious shortage no expert could quite explain. This episode explores compounding, second and third-order consequences, our preference for the present, and one of the most difficult questions any civilization must answer: What do we owe the future? Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffee. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifeblood George’s newest book is available! Get your copy of You’re Money Isn’t the Problem- You Are here: https://amzn.to/4uDYFRz Feeling busy but unfulfilled? The Meaningful Few helps you identify what truly matters, eliminate distractions, and live with intention and clarity. Learn more here: https://www.mymeaningfulfew.com/ Thanks, as always for listening! If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review here: ​​https://ratethispodcast.com/lifebloodpodcast You can learn more about us at LifeBlood. Live http://lifeblood.live/, Twitter https://twitter.com/ourlifeblood, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/lifebloodlive, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lifeblood.live/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNQ9Gc4mMwCHZKUHjbt0-qA and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lifebloodlive or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood. Live. Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates https://george-grombacher.aweb.page. Copyright LifeBlood 2026.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Since the dawn of time, for as long as human beings have been human beings, we've been telling stories. Because we know that being able to tell a story is such a powerful thing. We love stories. We like to hear stories. We like to tell stories that communicate really, really, really, really important messages, ideas, wisdom. It's how we transfer wisdom from one generation to the next. Talk about the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. These are just collections of amazing stories, of beautiful stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey, all of these things are stories that have been

• 1:26Speaker 01

  passed down through this oral tradition of sitting around a campfire or reading your kids a bedtime story, trying to instill wisdom and knowledge in a way that is not me preaching at you or finger waving. It's not me hitting you over the head with these stone tablets. It's telling the story of how things were, how things ought to be, in hopes that we can carry wisdom forward. Because if we do not carry wisdom forward, then we forget. And why does history repeat, or at very least rhyme? It's because we've forgotten.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Why do cultures rise and fall? Standards rise and fall? Good times create da, da, da, da, da. Hard times create da, da, da. We all know that saying these days. And here we are. A person is born, they do their work in the world, they pass away, and we can look backwards and we could say, what was the impact that this person had? Regardless of what their intentions were, what was the impact? And where are we at now because of that? And what's the way forward?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  So I wanted to tell you a story because somebody just passed away, a very, very, very famous person, as everybody, as every famous person will eventually pass away. But this person has had such a profound impact on our way of life and our national discourse and the way that families organize. And when that starts changing, there's going to be long-term rippling effects, the butterfly effect. One small thing's happened, one small thing happens today, but you don't really know what the impact is going to be over the future.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So I want you to tell, I want to tell you a story that's called "The Town That Ate Its Seed Corn." So once it happened that there was a prosperous little farming town, there was good soil, good people, really hard workers. And as far as anyone could remember, the farmers of this town practiced a peculiar tradition. Every year after the harvest, they took some of their very best corn and put it away. Not the rotten corn, not the leftovers, not the stuff that nobody wanted, their best corn. They carried it into barns, carefully stored it, protected it from moisture and from mice, and they did absolutely nothing with it.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  They didn't eat it, they didn't sell it, they didn't grind it into meal, they just left perfectly good corn sitting in a barn. Why? Because it was seed corn. Their fathers had done it, their grandmothers had done it, their great-grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done it. And like many traditions passed down through generations, eventually, people remembered the rule, but they forgot the reason. Then one year, a clever young fellow came to town. He was educated, well-spoken, very progressive in his thinking. And most importantly, he'd never planted corn. He took, he took one look inside the barns and he was astonished.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Do people realize how much perfectly good food is sitting in here? The farmers explained, "That's our seed corn." "Yes," he said, "I understand what you call it. I'm asking why hungry people aren't allowed to eat it." Well, that's a harder question. After all, there were people in town who could use more corn. There were families struggling to make ends meet, and there was all this corn just sitting there. Young fellow began writing about it in the newspaper. "Why should the living sacrifice for some hypothetical future harvest?" That got people's attention. He gave speeches. He pointed out that nobody could prove exactly how much corn would grow from any particular kernel.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Some wouldn't germinate, some plants would die, there could be drought, there could be floods, there could be insects. Therefore, he argued, "It was intellectually dishonest to treat every kernel of seed corn as though it represented future corn." You couldn't count corn that didn't exist. That sounded very sophisticated. Soon, other educated people, well, they agreed. And eventually, the town decided that perhaps the old farmers had been a little superstitious. So they ate some of the seed corn. And you know what happened? Nothing. Now, that's an important part of this story. Nothing bad happened. In fact, something wonderful happened.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  People ate better, families had more food, restaurants served larger portions, the town held a festival. The young reformer was celebrated. People wondered why they hadn't done this years ago. The following year, they ate a little more. And again, nothing terrible happened. There was still plenty of corn, so they ate a little more, and then a little more. Eventually, even the seed corn wasn't controversial at all. It became normal. A generation passed, then another, and almost nobody remembered why their peculiar ancestors

• 7:03Speaker 01

  had been so obsessed with keeping perfectly edible corn locked inside barns. But eventually, strange things began happening. The harvests weren't quite as large. There weren't as many farmers. Some farms disappeared altogether. The school had fewer children. The blacksmith couldn't find an apprentice. Businesses complained they couldn't find enough workers. There weren't as many young people supporting the old people. Taxes went up. The town began importing corn. Then it began importing workers. Then it, then it borrowed money to support the people who were no longer working.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And soon, everyone agreed, the town had a serious corn problem. Fortunately, they had experts. A commission was assembled, economists were summoned, politicians held hearings, the newspaper ran a 12-part series. The corn crisis. How did we get here?

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• 9:07Speaker 01

  One expert, they blamed the weather. Another blamed capitalism. Another blamed insufficient government investment in corn. One politician proposed tax credits for growing corn. Another proposed subsidizing corn purchases. Someone suggested increasing immigration from towns that still had corn. Someone else proposed raising the retirement age of farmers. Another expert explained that changing dietary preferences had created unprecedented structural challenges with the corn economy. Phew. Everyone agreed the situation was extraordinarily complicated. Outside the general store sat an old farmer.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  He listened to all of this for several days. Finally, he said, "Seems to me, we used to have plenty of corn." Everyone laughed. Old people, always oversimplifying things. But one young economist became curious, so he went into the town archives. He found the old harvest records, and he discovered something strange. For generations, the town had consistently reserved part of every harvest for planting. Then the amount started declining, slowly at first, then dramatically. And the economist realized something even more important. The town hadn't merely lost the corn it ate, it lost all the corn that corn would have

• 10:37Speaker 01

  grown. A kernel wasn't merely a kernel, it was a stalk, and the stalk contained ears, and those ears contained hundreds more kernels, some of which would become next year's seed, which would become another harvest, which would become another, which would become another. The economist presented his findings to the commission. One of the distinguished professors objected. "You cannot count corn that never existed." The old farmer happened to be sitting in the back of the room. He nodded, "Certainly." Then he said, "And apparently, you cannot eat it either." There's a strange thing about compounding.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  We're very good at understanding.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  We're very good at understanding it when we're talking about money. Put a dollar away today, allow it to grow, but allow the growth to grow, give it enough time, and something increasingly insignificant becomes enormous. We call that compound interest. We marvel at it. We make charts about it. We tell young people, start early because time matters. But compounding doesn't only work with money. It works with trees, businesses, ideas, institutions, traditions, knowledge, families, communities, civilizations, and destruction

• 12:11Speaker 01

  that compounds too. Remove something today and you don't merely lose the thing. You may also lose what the thing would have eventually produced. That's harder to see because the future leaves no receipts. We can count what exists. We're much worse at counting what never arrived. There is no empty chair with a name on it. No business with a closed sign. No invention sitting unfinished on a workbench. No missing taxpayer. No missing teacher. No

• 12:50Speaker 01

  missing carpenter. No missing mother. No missing father. No missing child. Nothing appears to be missing. It simply just isn't there. And that's what makes consuming seed corn so easy. The benefit is immediate. The cost, that arrives later. The person receiving the benefit exists today. The person paying the cost may not exist for decades. And perhaps that's one of the great temptations of civilization. We preference the present because the present can complain. The future cannot. The future doesn't vote. It doesn't contribute to campaigns.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  It doesn't attend town halls. It doesn't write angry letters to the newspaper. It doesn't demand representation. It doesn't even know what we're doing to it. So every generation inherits two things from the generation before it. What they built and what they consumed. We're very good at counting the first. We're not nearly as good at counting the second, particularly when what was consumed would have eventually produced something else.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  That's the trouble with seed corn. It looks exactly like dinner, and dinner has the considerable advantage of being hungry now. The harvest has no constituency. It can't vote. It can't complain. It can't write a letter to the editor. It can only fail to arrive. And 50 years later, very serious people will gather in a very expensive room to determine where the hell all the corn went.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  You could probably map this story on to just about every arena of society. I'm thinking about it in the context of one very, very, very, very specific part of our society and our culture. And hopefully you're getting, you're picking up what I'm putting down.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Hopefully it resonates.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. I guess, as always, I'm pleading, I'm imploring myself and everybody else to take a very, very, very thoughtful and measured and long-term view of the decisions that we make as individuals and the decisions that we're making as a society collectively. And we need to be able to see past the bridge of our own nose and to realize that each one of those, each one of those decisions will in fact lead to different

• 15:43Speaker 01

  long-term results for the better or for the worse. Very few things are static. Very few things are neutral. Most every decision that we make is going to have a negative or a positive impact on our future and on future generations and future people. So what I'm really talking about as always is doing your part by doing your best.

• 16:14Speaker 03

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