Back in my home state, the Los Angeles Times has a story about a state program that invests in renewable fuels projects and a grant that provides some support to a California-based ethanol company. The story is rife with political allegations, but I’m going to set that aside to talk about a few remarks made about ethanol.
The story talks about the California Alternative and Renewable Fuel and Vehicle Technology Program, created by former Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nuñez. In the article, he said that the program was designed to specifically not include supporting ethanol: There were “public assurances” made, the reporter writes. And Nuñez’s quote seems to support this:
“It’s appalling. We gave them a very clear direction where these funds should be going. Ethanol is yesterday’s news. It seems like there’s some inside deal going on.”
And there are also handy links to the legislation Nuñez authored to create the program, AB 118 of 2007 and AB 109 of 2008. Ethanol projects are clearly mentioned in both as suitable projects for funding.
Perhaps the reporter can follow this up in future stories. I somehow doubt it, because there are the comments from the reporter himself in the second paragraph, where he shows a little bias in how he picks and chooses his facts:
“When the fund was set up, its backers said it would not be used for corn ethanol, a decades-old gas additive that many environmental scientists argue is at least as bad for the planet as oil.”
Keep in mind, the advisory committee includes members of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists, two organizations notorious for their unblinking opposition to corn ethanol. In fact, the NRDC representative was quoted indirectly saying that “converting one farmer’s corn into fuel means that another farmer would have to fire up a tractor to grow more food.” Obviously, this person needs an education on yield trends, but maybe he’s just not keeping up with what’s been going on in the Corn Belt.
But there are others the reporter could have spoke with, such as Brooke Coleman at the New Fuels Alliance, also an advisory committee member. And the writer also could have looked beyond the Golden State for a broader perspective.
It seems almost daily we get reminders from new and old media alike espousing the perceived benefits of home gardening, locally grown food, organic and specialty farming. So where are the advocates for modern, high-tech family farms that still produce most of the food, fuel and fiber in this country?
What got me thinking about this yet again was an early morning email from a friend at the Chicago Board of Trade noting there were hot rumors circulating at CBOT that both corn and wheat crops in Argentina would be down from normal expectations.
This bit of news, on top of a well known drought afflicting Russia’s wheat production region, is expected to have significant consequence across the globe. Enter an educational moment. While many glass half empty sorts contemplate these “consequences,” all I found myself thinking is what a great example of why the commodity crop business and progressive, traditional farming exists.
Corn, wheat, soybeans, rice and other “commodity crops” are the foundation for our food production system. We grow them well, can convert them to many food and non food products, and they have a longer shelf life than many other crops.
This is also why the productive capacity of the US remains more important than ever. More agricultural self sufficiency around the world should always be a goal but Mother Nature sends us occasional reminders as to why US productive capacity is fundamental for mankind at large.
It also provides a textbook lesson as to why farming is not for the faint of heart. Another friend reminded me just this morning that farming carries huge risk. Just ask the lender at your local bank why farm loans make them break out in a cold sweat. Volatility from weather, international markets, speculation, changing infrastructure needs, insects and even anti-agriculture operatives make farming an interesting profession.
Despite all of the long hours and this smorgasbord of risk, US farmers weather it all delivering us food security and so much abundance that in times of short crops elsewhere, we are the most likely candidate to fill the gap, to soften the blow. So a better question might be how bad would things be without the technology, innovation and generations of knowledge represented on America’s family farms today?
So where are the advocates for mainstream agriculture? Believe me they exist and they are as passionate and devoted as anyone I know. But no one is standing in line to tell their story. No television satellite trucks are parked outside their farms. No investigate reporters are lurking behind their barn just waiting to tell this good news story.
So maybe it is time for us to grab the microphone/camera away and speak more directly with consumers. Social media like Facebook and Twitter offer this opportunity. Just go to www.twitter.com and type in the hash tag #agchat and you will see a growing army of farm advocates appear before your eyes. It’s time to do your part to fill the glass?
Rain makes grain and a rainy summer has Wisconsin expecting a record corn crop, but that doesn’t mean all is good in America’s Dairyland. According to one assistant professor at UW-Madison, this summer’s heat and moisture is yet another sign of the apocalypse that we’ve come to know as global warming. And he’s actually blaming Wisconsin’s water problems on Nebraska corn growers.
First he used a mind-numbing set of maps and charts (with statistics from 1950-2007) to convince us Wisconsin is dramatically wetter and warmer than ever – except for northwest Wisconsin which is in a prolonged drought and a few other pockets here and there. Huh? Both ideas are problematic because 2009 was one of our coolest summers on record and it’s wet in northwest Wisconsin this season. Still the speaker went on to suggest that southern Wisconsin’s floods are due to Nebraska corn growers: Not only is increased irrigation adding moisture to the air, he suggested the corn crop’s natural respiration is putting excessive moisture into the air, which in term, arrives via the Gulf Stream to southwest Wisconsin!
Having recently read Levitt and Dubner’s book “Super Freakonomics,” I have serious doubts about scientists using statistics to convince us of anything dealing with externalities as complex as global warming. The earth’s atmosphere is in constant, complex motion and we humans haven’t the slightest idea what will happen next. I’m even less inclined to expect something to continue – warm, wet weather for instance – simply because it’s happened in the past. Stick around long enough and what goes up comes down: Commodity prices and weather cycles included.
Fact is, all that excess water vapor our corn is producing might just create enough cloud cover to shade and cool the earth, subsequently reversing global warming. Then we can thank corn growers everywhere!
As I was browsing through the clip art on Microsoft Publisher 2007 on my mission to make a corn-related graphic for a post, I was disturbed to find this image of an ear of corn with a pitchfork through it. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m pretty sure the pitchfork here is not meant to signify its traditional use as an implement to move hay.
Is the reputation of corn so bad that Microsoft has to include a clip art image that equates it with the devil? Just in case you need to use it in your next neighborhood newsletter, perhaps? I mean, if you browse through the Microsoft Publisher clip art file, you will find relatively slim pickings for many searches. Try looking up soybeans, for example. The search yields two results – a happy-looking caricature woman hanging blocks of what apparently is tofu, and a bowl of edamame with chopsticks. No actual soybeans to be found – certainly none with pitchforks.
Maybe it is just an innocent representation of corn and farming. The key words for the image include corn, agriculture, nature, pitchforks, plants and tools. Nothing like devil or King Corn. If you do a search for pitchfork, there are a number of results that are about equally split between agricultural and demonic imagery, with some just plain pitchforks and no indication of how they might be used.
Like I say, it may all be perfectly innocent, since I’m sure that pitchforks are used to pitch corn silage, for example – but it’s still a little weird and suspect. And, if it is innocent, why does the pitchfork have those little devil-tail points? What do you think? Should Microsoft be kindly asked to have it removed?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has long been notorious for singleness of purpose but more so for many of its outlandish publicity stunts. Many of these inane stunts have gone a long way to hurt their credibility.
However, despite some of these goofy antics, many individuals and companies have given in to their demands rather than face any bad press. So it was refreshing to see their latest potshot at Dodge did a huge belly flop.
Dodge recently found itself in PETA’s crosshairs after the carmaker aired a commercial starring a monkey dressed up like Evel Knievel. PETA screamed monkey abuse and demanded the commercial be pulled. But, unlike many who draw the ire of PETA, Dodge fought back in a most amusing way.
Enter the invisible monkey and a new creative and comical way to deal with our animal rights brethren who are wound a bit too tight.
We are officially in the dog days of summer and as such many people are vacationing and that often means lots of driving and time with family.
With all the exposure to gas stations you may have noticed the word ethanol on pumps. It is pretty much everywhere these days as a 10% blend in gasoline and it is increasingly showing up in E85 formulations for flexible fuel vehicles or FFVs.
In fact, GM recently announced their continued commitment to E85 ethanol as “our best near-term solution. In fact, last month, we announced that we’re increasing annual production of Flex Fuel Vehicles (FFV) to more than 850,000 – that’s a 55 percent increase from the 2006 volumes,” said Candance Wheeler, a Gm Technical Fellow.
GM’s 2010 lineup represents the most FFV models on the market, providing drivers with multiple options to fuel their vehicles – E85 ethanol, petroleum, or a combination of the two. And with many new stations opening up, especially in the south and south central regions, it’s becoming easier find a place to fill up.
The latest development is something called a “Blender Pump,” but I like to call it a consumer pump because it allows you to choose what gas or ethanol mixture you want; unleaded gasoline, or 10%, 20%, 30% or 85% ethanol. If you have an FFV you can pick whichever one is the best bargain or whichever blend works best in your car.
Despite all for proven benefits of ethanol some detractors continue to spread misinformation regarding ethanol fuel. As the attached charts show, ethanol is a great fuel and an even better idea if you believe we should rely more on farmers and less on imported oil from hostile nations.
A new video offers a farm-level view of the importance of atrazine for no-till farmers. At a time when people are wanting to learn more about sustainability on the farm, going no-till where you can is one of the most environmentally friendly practices a farmer can do. Frankly, I’m surprised that the popular Farmville game on Facebook still requires tilling.
The importance of herbicides in no-till fields is important, and atrazine has proved to be safe, affordable and effective for growers, as the farmer in the video makes clear.
On the other side of the issue, recent news has been made about a California professor who has been considered the foremost anti-atrazine research expert in the country. Apparently, his e-mails to atrazine proponents have not been the most suitable for publication and Syngenta has even filed a complaint with his employer.
What do you do about a professor who sends employees of a company he dislikes a lengthy series of bizarre, rambling emails including one containing a graphic threat of sexual violence? If you’re NRDC, you support his nomination to EPA’s FIFRA Science Advisory Panel by saying that he “is pleasant to work with” and “tireless in his efforts to reach the highest scientific standards possible.”
I will not repeat the content of Hayes’s e-mails. I don’t care what e-mail address they were sent from and to whom they were addressed. They were beyond unprofessional and unethical. They were uncivilized and unstable and should lead everyone – even atrazine opponents – to shun his work.
On this issue, I’ll stick with farmers and their allies.
In the documentary Food Inc., an impoverished family talks about how it needs to rely on cheap McDonald’s dinners because shopping for healthier, fresher food is cost-prohibitive. The argument the show makes here, and others make elsewhere, is that we need to find a way to make good, healthy, even organic food cheaper.
Michael Pollan appears to disagree. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal today he argues that, on the contrary, food needs to be more expensive because, after all, we can eat less of it. “Eight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that’s $1.50. It’s really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives.”
Of course, you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, as long as you add a few other things that might increase the cost a little.
Further, Pollan’s dissection of the cost of a box of strawberries is appropriate, but would leave some folks wondering whether he is in favor of pesticides:
“We’ve been conditioned by artificially cheap food to be shocked when a box of strawberries costs $3. But it’s important to know that farmers aren’t getting wealthy. When you see strawberries being sold for $1 a box, picture the kind of labor it takes to pick those strawberries and the kind of chemicals it takes to produce those kinds of strawberries without hand weeding.”
A recent study attempted to make the case that if the U.S. government allowed the ethanol tax credit to expire it would have very few adverse consequences for the U.S. industry. The fact the study was funded by the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol industry was dutifully avoided.
Anti-ethanol folks, who have been receiving a lot of attention on this blog of late, made sure the study got plenty of media splash because it helped them further their own causes. Interesting they didn’t showcase the source of the funding for the study or point out how badly Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry lusts after access to the world’s largest ethanol market…the USA.
And in today’s budget conscious environment in Washington, DC their efforts are getting some traction. The direct cost of the ethanol incentives is being reviewed independently without any comparative assessment to savings in farm bill costs, how much we spend militarily on protecting our petroleum shipping lanes, or the economic fallout from depending on foreign oil. Federal tax revenue generated by the production and use of U.S. ethanol totaled more than $8 billion in 2009, $3 billion more than the value of the tax credit.
It is amazing how quickly some of our elected officials have forgotten the core rationale for putting the US ethanol tax credit in place. President Ronald Reagan, who was not exactly a political Dove, regularly noted it is in America’s best interest to reduce the world’s dependency on oil from unstable regions of the world.
That’s why Reagan and virtually every president since has asked domestic alternative energy producers like ethanol to step up. He also noted the expense related to America’s foreign oil addiction and how helpful bringing these energy jobs and the billions of dollars ($1 billion day) we send overseas could be for the U.S. economy.
Despite this clarion call the aforementioned detractors, which mysteriously enough include some environmental groups, like to preach the benefits of sugarcane ethanol; sometimes called “slash-and burn ethanol.”(See attached photo). It’s even more amazing some U.S. regulatory agencies actually tout Brazilian ethanol as an “advanced biofuel over the American made corn product. In case you were wondering the photo shows a burning cane field in Brazil. The Sao Paulo area alone burns 8,000 sq miles of field producing incredible amounts of volatile compounds and particulates.
To make harvesting easier, which reduces manual labor costs, sugarcane fields are burned prior to harvest to remove the plants’ leaves. Considering the near slave labor conditions in some cane fields I guess this burning might seem a gift for the machete wielding masses, despite the obvious environmental costs of the massive burning.
If critics are truly concerned about our fuel needs and specific environmental and economic consequences consider the following:
Data from the Brazilian sugar organizations clearly shows they are planning, by 2020, to export 63% more sugar and export 336% more ethanol – all at the expense of increasing the land area required for sugarcane by 78%. Corn based ethanol is being provided with increased corn yields on the same acreage and using modern production processes throughout the production chain.
Sugarcane ethanol provides primarily ethanol, with some electircal cogeneration. Corn based ethanol provides ethanol, high protein feed for livestock, corn oil, and even captured CO2 from the fermentation process to carbonate soft drinks.
Sugarcane ethanol provides jobs that don’t meet subsistence level incomes, while jobs in the ethanol production chain are highly skilled jobs that provide long term employment and taxable income for local schools etc…
And the next time you want to get on a soapbox promoting sugarcane ethanol consider the following items below which are being ignored to make Brazilian product look better than it is:
Ignoring direct and indirect emissions from crop residues;
Use of inappropriately low fertilizer rates;
Failure to account for energy inputs for dehydration of hydrous ethanol;
Failure to accurately assess transport of ethanol from Brazil to U.S.
Failure to assess actual cane harvesting practices and processing in Brazil
At the end of the day if the U.S. ends up importing more ethanol, then we will once again lose a domestic growth industry, export American jobs, and become dependent on foreign energy producers.
As I was browsing through the clip art on Microsoft Publisher 2007 on my mission to make a corn-related graphic for a post, I was disturbed to find this image of an ear of corn with a pitchfork through it. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m pretty sure the pitchfork here is not meant to signify its traditional use as an implement to move hay.
