America is Too Corny

According to this article from Matt Reynolds at Slate: We Have Way Too Much Corn

the Corn Belt is on the move. Over the past couple of decades, farmland devoted to corn production has been creeping northward and westward. In North and South Dakota, grasslands that were formerly used for cattle grazing or set aside for conservation have been converted to cornfields. Between 2005 and 2021, the area of land harvested for corn in the U.S. increased by around 14 percent.

 

One of the big drivers of this shift has been bioethanol—transportation fuel usually made from fermented corn. Since 2005, the U.S. government’s Renewable Fuel Standard has mandated that gasoline producers blend corn ethanol into their fuel. The amount the RFS requires to be mixed in has ratcheted up each year from the policy’s start, and since 2016 gasoline producers have been instructed to blend 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually into transportation fuel. The RFS was supposed to reduce reliance on fuel imports and lessen the environmental impact of the transportation sector, but when it was introduced some scientists warned that it might end up increasing overall emissions. Now it looks like those predictions have come to pass.

 

In February, Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, published a study analyzing the impact of the RFS. Lark and his colleagues researched the impact the policy had on crop prices and farm expansion between 2008 and 2016, comparing the real-world situation with a counterfactual one where biofuel production was kept at levels mandated in an earlier version of the RFS.

Lark’s study found that the RFS significantly pushed up the price of corn. This incentivized the expansion of total U.S. cropland by 2.1 million hectares between 2008 and 2016—an increase of 2.4 percent. Often the areas newly converted to cropland were grasslands on the western edge of the Corn Belt. “Over millennia these grasslands have created really carbon-rich soils. And what happens is, when you plow that up, you expose a lot of it and make it vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere,” says Lark.

 

The supposed benefit of biofuel is that, although it still releases carbon dioxide when it burns, that carbon was drawn down from the atmosphere by the plants that make up the fuel rather than being released from oil that was once underground. But growing fuel creates emissions too. The biggest problem is when land that used to be a carbon sink is plowed up to plant crops, but manufacturing fertilizer is also a major source of emissions, and applying that fertilizer to land also releases greenhouse gasses in the form of nitrous oxide emissions.

In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets the amount of corn ethanol required by the RFS, estimated that by 2022 corn ethanol would have total life-cycle emissions 20 percent lower than gasoline. But these projections didn’t account for the dramatic effect the RFS would have on land use in the U.S. “I don’t think people expected as much land to come back into production,” says Lark. His study found that the RFS increased corn prices by 30 percent and the prices of other crops by 20 percent. In response, farmers who previously used their land for cattle grazing or were involved in conservation schemes started growing crops instead. All this land use change has essentially outweighed the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that come from growing fuel instead of pumping it out of oil wells.

I yield to no man in my disdain for gasahol. It takes uses ground that that could be growing food for people, or at least food for our food (animals), instead of being wasted as a vehicle fuel for which it doesn't even serve the proclaimed function of reducing greenhouse gases. And the fuel isn't even very good, less energy dense than gasoline, and prone to water absorption problems. But it is a bi-partisan folly.  

The Wombat has posted Rule 5 Sunday: Anya Forger on time and under budget at The Other McCain.

But You Can't Eat Solars

An article in the Bay Journal arguing for solar farms over corn fields: Become more enlightened on the benefits of solar energy fields

In his article, Solar power’s new look: more landscape-friendly siting (April 2018), Timothy B. Wheeler wrote, “But if many cornfields turn into solar fields, it could have unforeseen consequences on land use, local economies, wildlife habitat and maybe even water quality.” Actually, we have enough scientific knowledge to foresee quite a few of those consequences — and they would be positive ones. For example:

• Cornfields are dominated by a single crop species, while the vegetation under solar fields is much more varied (native grasses, goldenrods, etc.) and thus more biodiverse. Because of these differences, the vegetation under solar fields provides much better habitat for wildlife — particularly for early-successional bird species whose populations have been declining at alarming rates. Similarly, solar fields provide much better resources for pollinating insects such as bees and butterflies than cornfields.
• Cornfields are annual row crops and, of course, farmers try to keep the growth of weeds between those rows to a minimum. This means that they have considerable amounts of bare ground and thus substantial losses of soil to erosion, together with the runoff of the nutrients that spur eutrophication, a major cause of the Bay’s dead zones. On the other hand, the meadow vegetation under solar fields is perennial, not annual, and thus provides year-round cover. So it reduces erosion and nutrient runoff significantly. This is true even compared to well-managed row crop rotations using no-till management and winter cover crops.
• Unlike cornfields, solar fields don’t require the use of insecticides, fungicides, tillage or irrigation. Nor do they require fertilizer, whether synthetically or from manure, both of which lead to water pollution.
• Solar fields provide substantially more revenue to rural landowners, with much lower costs as well as less risk. The income they generate is dependable over the long term because typical solar leases are for periods of 20 years or more.

Sure, but what if the price of corn goes through the roof, and the solar subsidy is eliminated, and the value of corn on the land is worth more than the price of the power produced?

This makes it possible for farmers to keep their land instead of having to sell it in the face of suburban sprawl.

Moreover, the benefits of converting cornfields to solar reach far beyond the farm. By reducing global warming, they slow down the rising sea levels and extreme storms that threaten communities along the Bay and far beyond.

 My usual response to the fallacious rising sea level argument:

(There's also no evidence of increasing storminess)

They also cut down on the air pollution from coal-fired electric power plants, gasoline-burning cars and natural-gas-heated offices. In this way they reduce one of the most important threats plaguing public health, manifested in such illnesses as asthma, toxic chemicals such as mercury, and smog.

Like a cornfield, a solar farm uses land and the sun’s energy to produce something that people vitally need. But it does it with a lot more positive impact on the environment — locally, across the Bay’s watershed and around the world.

And, it makes possible the transition to an economy powered by 100 percent renewable energy — the critical environmental need of the 21st century.

I can buy the argument that producing solar electricity is marginally better than growing corn to make ethanol to burn in cars. But you can't eat electricity.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links. Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Camille Paglia Approved!" open for business at The Other McCain.

Corn: Better in Your Stomach Than in Your Gas Tank

Study finds Corn better used as food than biofuel

. . . To compare the energy efficiency and environmental impacts of corn production and processing for food and for biofuel, the researchers inventoried the resources required for corn production and processing, then determined the economic and environmental impact of using these resources – all defined in terms of energy available and expended, and normalized to cost in U.S. dollars.

“There are a lot of abstract concepts to contend with when discussing human-induced effects in the critical zone in agricultural areas,” Richardson said. “We want to present it in a way that will show the equivalent dollar value of the human energy expended in agricultural production and how much we gain when corn is used as food versus biofuel.”

Kumar and Richardson accounted for numerous factors in their analysis, including assessing the energy required to prepare and maintain the landscape for agricultural production for corn and its conversion to biofuel. Then, they quantified the environmental benefits and impacts in terms of critical zone services, representing the effects on the atmosphere, water quality and corn’s societal value, both as food and fuel.

In monetary terms, their results show that the net social and economic worth of food corn production in the U.S. is $1,492 per hectare, versus a $10 per hectare loss for biofuel corn production.

A big gain versus a net loss? Gasohol  has been a bipartisan boondoggle, and it's time to end it.