Will there be enough corn?(ethanol to blame)

[4dsc]

I am glad too see that someone is finally asking the hard questions about corn based ethanol.. Will there be enough corn is what every politican should be aksing before appoving one more ethanol plant..

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/BUSINESS01/611190337&lead=1

Ethanol boom poses environmental, economic challenges for Iowa

It's hard to believe, but with fuel processors ratcheting up demand, Iowa could one day find itself short of its signature product.

"There is a collision course on the horizon, but when and how severe it is going to be, I don't know," said Doug Thompson, a corn and soybean grower near Kanawha, in north-central Iowa.

[orpupilofnature57]

1. How much Corn Syrup should we take Out of food? More than enough!

[ananda]

6. No more corn syrup!

That stuff is bad bad bad for so many reasons.

[Stargazer99]

2. How about a few more farmers? And I don't mean

Corporate farmers. Give Joe Citizen a break..our jobs are outsourced. This would be a good chance for employment for our own people and keep the gd damn corps OUT of production. We used to have far more farmers than we do today. Keep the corps out of this.

[kenny blankenship]

3. Who will save the corn?

--or more importantly perhaps, the topsoil?
Or what about the fact that it takes petroleum fertilizers and herb/insect/icides to produce the corn in the first place?

[Gregorian]

8. You nailed it.

But since we can't talk about the real problem, we'll just have to keep addressing the symptoms.

Hint: It's not about billions of people in cars demanding to live like kings. Not at all. Shhhh. Don't talk about it.

Maybe fusion. But that only addresses a portion of the problem.

I think top soil is a bigger subject than people realize. Currently, houses sit on top of the world's most productive land.

Don't talk about it.

[NNadir]

4. I'm not sure that corn is the best option. Without sounding like JohnWxy...

...though, it would seem that the potential for new ethanol technologies have some merit.

I recently referenced a technical discussion of the use of corn stover (the plant, and not the corn) and good old switchgrass.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x72526

Certainly such strategies in some places have some potential to greatly enhance ethanol yields per acre of land. The full environmental life cycle analysis suggests that the impact of cellulosic ethanol is less than half the impact of gasoline.

I will be the first to acknowledge that people have been talking about switchgrass and corn stover forever without actually doing anything. On the other hand, cellulosic ethanol can do something, I think. It will never be as dangerous as oil, and we must ban oil as soon as is possible. Certainly the effort will not be risk free, nor will it be environmentally neutral. That said there is very little risk that cellulosic ethanol will be quite as bad as oil.

For many years certain industrial intermediates, including the important industrial compound furan and some nylon intermediates, were manufactured using corn cobs as a starting material. Eventually oil based options became cheaper and the renewable strategies were discarded. However at the right price, the renewable options will become viable again.

To repeat: Biomass can do a little more. It is not as much as people like to represent, but it can do something, I think.

[msongs]

5. lots of good news/bad news here - worst is water waste

and the aquifers of the plains being sucked dry for corporate profits.


instead of using corn grains, maybe they use all the left over corn stalks?

good news: higher price for meat = people eat less of it; we can stop all farm corporate welfare subsidies; lower fuel imports from foreign dictatorships propped up by US oil companies; you'd be surprised at all the products containing corn, especially corn sugars, so maybe those products will decline and health will increase?

bad news: waste; less food for people; pollution; one bad farm year wipes out the whole shebang.

why not go straight to solar and forget the whole corn thing? as in electric cars recharged from some sort of solar devices.


Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[eppur_se_muova]

11. corn stover = corn stalks

googling "corn stover" gets this as the #1 hit: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy02/31792.pdf

Basic conclusion: 40-50% of corn stover can be converted to ethanol sustainably. Going for maximum recovery tips the carbon balance more towards net CO2 production.

[yourout]

7. There are thousands of acres in our county that are paid to sit idle.

Wisconsin alone could produce %30 more corn than we currently produce.

[4dsc]

9. There's a good reason why the land is idle

now I can only assume here but I suspect there are good reasons why the hilly land of Wisconsin is under CRP!!

[NickB79]

10. If you want to damage the environment, yes we could recrop CRP land

But in doing so, you would have to plow under restored grasslands and restored wetlands, as well as clearcut reforested areas. In doing so, you lose millions of acres of land used for wildlife habitat, and you lose the millions of dollars of income generated each year by hunters and fishermen who use CRP land.

Farmers do not put prime cropland into CRP. They are actually prohibited from doing so, as the land must meet certain standards, such as marginal soil fertility and excessive slope that would promote erosion if repeatedly plowed. My father is a farmer in Minnesota, and has at times enrolled some of his less productive fields into CRP. The money you are paid by the CRP program is a fraction of what fertile, flat cropland could yield, especially with corn and soybean prices what they are. Only a fool would leave useable land in CRP when you could make many times more profit by cropping it. Expansion of corn into CRP land is not a solution for increasing corn production.