Reply #56: The problem with ethanol/BD is that industrial corn production requires [View All]

[politicat]

fossil fuels - not just for the farm machinery, though that's a big bite, but for the fertilizers that we have to put on the land to make it productive enough to grow corn. Also, most farm machinery is diesel powered, not gasoline powered, so you're really looking at biodiesel, not ethanol, and soy or rapeseed rather than corn.

Corn exhausts soil if it is grown on the same patch of land more than 2 years out of 5. It sucks up the nitrogen, tilling to kill weeds ends up damaging the microbes in the soil, so there's not much of a chance for them to do their jobs, breaking down dead root matter into new soil. (Plus, tillage leads to erosion, and water pollution and a bunch of other problems.) So the best option is to rotate back and forth between soybeans (which as legumes, fix nitrogen in the soil), corn, and a third crop, like clover pasturage (though pastures should be designated pastures and never tilled at all, but that's another discussion.)

So, say a farmer has three fields. In year one, He grows corn in field A, soy in B and leaves C fallow. In year two, he leaves A alone, corn in B and soy in C. In year three, he grows corn in both B and C and soy in A. Year four is Corn in A, soy in B and C, and in year five, it's corn in C, soy in A and B. Then repeat the cycle. In theory, he could be selling part of the soy, processing the rest into biodiesel to run the farm machinery, and selling the corn, stalks and all, for ethanol. Here's where the problem comes in: To produce the levels of crop necessary to support soy-biodiesel and ethanol production, as well as the current levels of corn consumption, we have to use herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, all of which are petroleum based. And we have to increase production of soy and corn to cover the new fuel needs.

An acre of soybeans produces about 40 bushels (just over a ton, at 2240 pounds). We get about 48 gallons of oil per acre. In converting to biodiesel, there's about an .8 efficiency, so an acre of soybeans produces 38 gallons of biodiesel. Current average diesel use for farm use only is 28.9 gallons per acre. So an acre of soy can produce just a little over 9 gallons of surplus diesel (above what it own needs). Average farm runs about 500 acres, that's 4500 gallons of diesel, and the sale price for bulk diesel is about 2.30 a gallon. That's just over $10,000. The cost of the seed, the fertilizer, the pesticides and the herbicides to make that original 40 bushels of soybeans per acre is about $184 per acre (In Iowa. The price varies depending on location, cost of living, cost of land, etc. But Iowa's a good rule of thumb, since they're about the middle of the cost structure.). So assuming the 500 acres of soybeans... $92,000 to raise the crop. Most farmers need to make about $12,000 over costs to cover living expenses. (http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html, http://msucares.com/news/print/cropreport/crop99/cr990611.htm)

With a higher yield oil crop (like rapeseed, peanuts, or jojoba), the oil yields go up, but the break-even point goes up, too. Rapeseed and peanuts can be mechanized, but jojoba isn't yet.

Monoculturing is hard on the land - that's why it has to have so much in the way of chemical assistance. But a mixed use farm - where there's manure and chickens who scratch and hooves that break up the soil and nibble down the grasses and vegetables growing alongside grain - while more productive per acre, require more labor per acre, and when labor costs for commodity crops (like soybeans, rapeseed and corn) go up, producer profits go down, and require producers to put more land under monoculture.

As far as ethanol goes: an acre of corn produces 7100 pounds of corn and that can produce about 328 gallons of ethanol. The market wholesale price for ethanol is currently about $1.60 for a gallon of ethanol, and costs between $375 to $440 an acre to produce the corn. (Biomass ethanol production - like on cornstalks - is still not as well developed as making ethanol from corn, so I'm not going to get into that one.) Assume 100 acres. $32,800 to sell the ethanol versus $37,500 to grow the corn. It's a losing proposition unless we go back to the old method of land subsidy supports. Using 97 numbers (the oldest ones I have right now), it cost us $237 an acre to grow our corn (and we grow organically). Ethanol sold for $.87 in 1997. Productivity numbers were about the same - so we would have made a very small profit - not enough to cover living expenses for our farm manager, much less support anyone else. It all depends on the year, the price of corn, what supports are in place, etc. But profits are either going to be small, nonexistent, or the farmer takes a loss.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050329132436.htm, http://corn.agronomy.wisc.edu/WCM/1999/W060.html, farm records for M***** Farms, Greentown, Indiana.)

Read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. Other than the fact that he got a kinda major fact wrong* his statistics on petroleum use in industrial, organic, beyond-organic and the wild food chains are pretty solid, and jibe with numbers from my family farm and with national USDA numbers.

*The fact he got wrong is that all poultry and pigs may not be fed hormones ever, at all, for any reason, in the United States, and we don't import either chickens or hogs (This is a major FDA ruling, and one of the few that is in very simple english), so there are never any artificial hormones in chickens or hogs. (Cattle are another story.) Antibiotics can only be used medicinally and not within essentially 5 days times the metabolic excretory rate (i.e. chickens metabolize antibiotics out of they system in about 3 days, so they cannot have antibiotics at all in the last 2 weeks before slaughter; pigs metabolize out in about 4 days, so they can't have antibiotics in the last 20 days before slaughter.) Again, cattle are another story. Hormone free, antibiotic free labels are marketing when they're slapped on chicken or pork -- all chickens and all pork are hormone and antibiotic free. See the USDA consumer fact sheets at: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/