Don’t speculate with food, or you will lose. Since the turn of the 20th Century, the US has had such an overabundance of food that it is an economic problem.
Even at the height of the Dust Bowl, when tens of thousands of farms were wiped out from Texas to Canada, there was still a crushing surplus of food. When the Great Depression-era deflation hit (currency shortage), food was worth less than it cost to bring it to market.
So, at the same time as corn was being burned as fuel, people in the cities worried about starving.
FDR intervened, with emphasis on reducing the surplus *first*, and then providing some of the surplus to soup kitchens to feed the hungry and unemployed. Only by reducing the surplus could agriculture hope to recover.
So FDR created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, and one of their first acts was to drive, with armed police, from farm to farm, killing and burying pigs in the highly decentralized pork industry.
The FSRC killed and destroyed SIX MILLION pigs, and that was just the start. Farms entire harvests were confiscated and destroyed, and the families told that they were no longer farmers, but to move to the city, or starve.
Everyone today should remember the vast amount of corn that was set aside to produce ethanol. While it did drive up prices in many things *some*, there was no real crisis. It barely made a dent in our food supply.
Yet enough ethanol was produced to support every gas station in the US, with perhaps 10% of the fuel they sold.
In 2014, 136.78 billion gallons of gasoline were sold in the US. Imagine how much corn was needed to produce the ethanol one tenth of that, 13.7 billion gallons?
Most farms now days are corporate farms and they suffer the same ups and downs as any corporation no matter what goods or services they sell.
Most rural and semi-rural, which was a good potion of America at the time of the great depression survived because they had truck gardens, and backyard chicken coops and farmers selling on the side of the road or even door to door.
My grandmother had a egg man in the early 60’s and also sold fresh garden vegetables in season.