This is from an old documentary film project by a great US writer, John Steinbeck. The film is called The Forgotten Village The film, reportedly, documents the arrival of "modern medicine" ( I imagine this means at least one doctor) in a poor village in Mexico. In the sequence, the writer is using (quite explicitly) "corn" as a symbol for life itself, and for the thread which keeps the poor farming families alive. He uses "corn" with repetition, emphasis and gravity, almost poetically, contrasting this constrained and fragile life of the subsistence farmer with other lives his readers (viewers) might know or know about. When the corn runs out, what will happen to the family? Corn has to be saved, to plant, to pay rent, to buy necessities. Yet it also the staple food they depend on to live right now. Consume, or invest? Consume, and invest? In what proportions ...? In a way, you could argue that Steinbeck is prefiguring the economic analysis of Pierro Sraffa, who in 1960 produced a short economic text, The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, in which he seeks to reintroduce a physical and practical base to a discourse in the field of economics that, to some, seemed to have become too abstract, mathematical and symbolic and to have lost its ability to explain what actually happens in any direct way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Village https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/306832/the-forgotten-village-by-story-by-john-steinbeck/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920515571760j

Hello! I think the gist of "With corn they rent the land the corn grows on" is as follows: It costs money to rent the land that the corn grows on, and this money comes from selling previous crops of corn. So it could be written like this: "With the money earned from the sale of corn, they rent the land that is used to grow the corn". That is the cycle of farming in general - fresh or dry produce is sold to make money to grow and produce more. I hope that helps!