Ethanol Producer Defends Farmers’ Ingenuity
Posted: March 26, 2009
An ethanol producer rose to the defense of both the biofuel and American farmers in an Omaha World-Herald opinion piece this week.
Chuck Woodside, who is chief executive officer of KAAPA Ethanol in Minden, NE and secretary of the Renewable Fuels Association, says attacks upon corn ethanol are becoming more frequent and fanciful – but “there’s scarcely a kernel of truth in any of them.”
“Their fundamental flaw is underestimating the ingenuity of the American ethanol industry — and American agriculture as well. Both are becoming more technologically advanced and more efficient in every way, including their use of energy, water and land.”
(P)roducing increased amounts of grain ethanol requires remarkably little land in this country and exerts a negligible impact on land use throughout the world. The total amount of cropland dedicated to American ethanol production in 2007 was only 0.6 percent of the worldwide total.
Moreover, the total amount of agricultural land required to produce 15 billion gallons of grain ethanol in the United States by 2015, as required by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, would most likely be less than 1 percent of world cropland.
Meanwhile, agriculture is becoming more efficient, especially in this country and throughout the world as well.
It would have taken more than twice as much land in 1967 to grow the corn crop that the world harvested in 2007. Further minimizing the supposed problem, vast amounts of land are still available, if needed, for agricultural expansion throughout the world.
As the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has reported, while some 1.5 billion hectares of land are currently used for arable and permanent crops, 2.8 billion hectares remain that are suitable for rain-fed farming. (A hectare is approximately 2.47 acres.)
Read the entire op-ed here.
