This post is from the farm, just so you get the truth and not the hype. First of all, corn that is primarily consumed by humans is called sweet corn and that corn takes up about 600,000 acres out of the roughly 15 million acres planted to corn. So, the corn you eat as FOOD isn’t the corn product that you eat at your dinner table. The corn that is used for ethanol is what we call field corn. That corn is also used to make corn syrup and fructose as well as other industrial products such as plastic bags (bio degradable). The bulk of the field corn is used to feed cattle, pigs, chickens and other livestock. All ethanol production does is take some of that cattle feed and send it to an ethanol plant where it is ground, mixed, and fermented to make ethanol. Once the sugar is removed from the corn in the fermenting process the corn is then removed from the ethanol tank, dried and processed into millers grain for cattle feed. The result is that all of that corn that is used for etahnol production is also used for cattle feed. It diverts nothing from the average Joe and Jane’s kitchen table, nor does it remove feed grain from livestock.
Turn now to the energy used to produce ethanol. Ethanol production is a new technology and it is going through the usual process of enhancement. Energy used to make ethanol has been cut in half over the past several years. Also, new ethanol plants are being constructed near feedlots where manure can be turned into methane gas and that methane gas produces the energy to make the ethanol.
As for other farm products. Soybeans and corn work well together because these are complimentary crops that are grown in rotation. One year corn, the next year soybeans. Soybeans leave nitrogen in the soil, and corn then uses that nitrogen. So the total acreage of corn and soybeans is very complimentary. Other grains grown on the farm, wheat for example, are not used in the manufacture of any bio energy product. Yet, the price of wheat has gone up. So don’t think that ethanol is driving up the cost of food.
Most people don’t realize that just a few years ago, before the ethanol ramp-up, the cash price of corn was so low ($2 bucks a bushel) that people were burning corn for heat.
The bottom line is that biofuels do not drive up the cost of food. We still have millions of acres of land that is in CRP and can easily be taken out of that program and planted to crops.
