As promised:
As I’ve said in other thread, people could certainly eat field corn and soybeans but in the North American culture we have chosen not to in a vast majority of the cases. And this isn’t anything really new. The term “Corn Belt” came to be in the 1890s and was well established as a regional term by the 1920s. The primary production was to fatten livestock (hogs and cattle) with high inputs of corn in the finishing process. Beef cattle could be finished solely on grass and legume fodder but it would typically take a longer time and the taste is different than what we’ve become accustomed to with corn-fed beef (for example, my wife doesn’t like grass-finished beef or bison—she thinks it’s too “gamey”). Corn as grain is not a natural food for cattle (care must be taken to keep it in balance in a ration or the animal will become sick). This is not a factor for hogs and poultry because they are omnivores and can handle corn better (pigs have stomachs like us and poultry a gizzard for grinding their food before digestion). Soybeans started off as straight animal fodder in the US but its oil properties soon found its way into direct human foods. Soybean meal is still used in various livestock feed but not to the degree of corn. Over the past 80 years, especially after WWII, more and more broken down components of corn and soybeans have been used in packaged food we buy at the grocery stores to the point now that just about any manufactured food we buy has some sort of corn or soy element to it. So, we have decided by our collective actions over time that we want to eat corn and soybeans through our meats and our manufactured foods. If North Americans truly want to stop complaining how different uses of corn may affect the price of our foods (usually when prices go higher—sort of amazing that the prices rarely come down when corn or soybeans prices that farmers get head south and bottom out), then they should stop buying grocery store food, buy bulk corn and soy from an elevator or wholesaler, get a grain grinder, and spent a lot more time in the kitchen cooking. A couple bushels of corn and a bushel of soybeans would last a family a long time providing base calories and protein. But of course time is money and we prefer spending our money on store bought food (in the typical case).
Ethanol as a vehicle fuel is also not a recent invention. Grain alcohol as a gasoline additive or straight use was first used when automobiles were created but lost favor to gasoline but became wide spread during WWII as a gas extender when the military got first shot at the oil production but soon after the war, the crack down on home or small scale ethanol production to add to gas was done by the various governments because it was feared that a certain amount of hooch would be used for tax-free drinking and they would lose tax revenue from booze. Not much interest for ethanol in the 1950s and 1960s with a stable and ample supply of cheap oil. That started to change in the 1970s because of increasing volatility in global oil supplies/distribution and that lead was being phased out of gas in the US. Lead had been used as way to reduce engine knocking and increase the octane in gas. “Gasohol” appeared around the second economic shock of the 1970s (late 70s) and one of the “cultural hearths” of modern vehicle ethanol fuel was in southeast South Dakota where our corn tended to get the lowest price per bushel vs. other regional corn areas because we were furthest from corn using manufacturing or export via the New Orleans area ports. And we didn’t produce enough corn then to fill many car single commodity “unit trains” such as they could out of downstate Illinois or from Iowa and run them to West Coast ports to sell to Japan and S. Korea (China at this time wasn’t a corn or soybean buyer of US production). I started using 10% ethanol by at least 1981 and have used it ever since.
Ethanol use increased as it was used as a gasoline oxygenator, especially in big metro areas that had high amounts of “smog”. By the late 1990s, the first major gas oxygenator, MTBE, was becoming a failure because it was a significant polluter of ground water as it leaked from underground tanks and spills. Ethanol was a potential replacement and became more widespread in usage, especially in non-corn producing regions such as the Northeast and Pacific Coast. Ethanol became more entrenched in the 2000s as laws were passed in 2005 and 2007 that “mandated” more renewable fuels although the mandates have very little overall teeth to them (unless you’re the specific company that gets singled out for intensive review) because the E10 market is now basically saturated, there are not a lot of vehicles that can burn E85, and the mid-range blends of E15-E30 have struggled to get EPA (and automotive maker) approvals. Ethanol for fuel production has stayed pretty flat-lined the last few years as opposed to the big run up in production in the decade 2000-2010 or so.
Ethanol isn’t perfect but there’s a lot of piling on trying to show its faults. One colleague of mine says it’s an “unholy” alliance of big oil, big beef cattle finishers, and the EPA that come together against corn-based ethanol. One cry is that ethanol is subsidized and the industry couldn’t stand on its own. Well, the federal government has been subsidizing most farmers in the US for 80 years now in one form or another. Is ethanol more egregious in cost than other big ones, such as direct payments when commodity prices are below the cost of production (which happens more than farmers would like)? Or the wide spread use of fed backed crop insurance? Or whatever else they want to name? Production agriculture for general markets has always been a risky adventure in the US and has become an increasingly highly capitalized venture (a trend that has been ongoing for a long time). Farmers can make nice money when the prices are high (typically for a number of reasons) and production optimal. Farmers can also lose money fast when markets and/or production tank and the input costs are already spent. Have that happen over several years in a row and trouble brews fast. Could the typical farmer of today weather all the downs over a 40-50 year career without government subsidies? Doubtful. Does this mean that people haven’t figured out all the angles to play to make the most money off of the government and that programs don’t have various of levels of “waste” in them. Absolutely not. Is there a way to make US farm policy better? Perhaps, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that. Too much money involved and reformers get eaten. And most North Americans won’t change their ways unless really forced one way or another. Farming and food production to most is background noise of life.
Another way ethanol is criticized is that it’s not energy efficient, that it costs more in energy to make than it produces. Caution on several fronts. Some of the earliest studies of this used the assumption that all (most) corn grown for ethanol was irrigated. But with the exception of NB and KS, the other main Corn Belt region where most of the ethanol plants are still located, most corn is rain fed. Another major assumption in such modeling is that if it weren’t for ethanol Corn Belt farmers wouldn’t grow corn. This is not reality. In spite of its faults, corn generally has the most revenue producing potential of the leading crops in an average year because people (especially the chemists) have been busy creating products. There are at least 7 leading markets for US corn that I can account for (livestock feed, ethanol for fuel—and some of this back as livestock feed, components of manufactured foods, export markets, sweeteners, plastics, and other industrial uses) compared to say wheat which does not have as many non-direct food usages (but the Russians certainly have made alcohol from it over the years!). Most North American farm commodity production is not energy efficient. But unless we all plan to go back to growing our own food or force changes by redirecting how we spend our money on food, things will probably not change much. For better or worse, ethanol as a certain percentage of our vehicle fuel is probably here to stay. And corn (either as grain now or a combo of grain and cellulosic from corn residue in the near future) will be either the significant or a substantial player in its production for a long time. And so it goes…
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