Ethanol backlash in the Midwest

The nearest cornfield from my home is probably twenty miles away--such farms are in a holding pattern until the right price is reached to turn the land into a town home development.

But if corn prices keep going up maybe keeping those farms up and running makes sense--that is if the ethanol boom continues. It may not.

The arguments for ethanol are that it decreases our demand for foreign oil, it saves marginal farms from going under by increasing corn prices, which trickles over to other crops, and best of all, it offers to save dying small towns with the construction of ethanol refineries nearby.

The negatives are clear: The net energy gain received from ethanol are minimal, refining corn to get to the end product takes a lot of energy--some scientists even claim ethanol is a net energy loser--in short, it takes more energy to produce ethanol than we get out of it.

Marginal land, such as this sandy cornfield in western Kansas which would be better off producing wheat--or nothing at all--require massive amounts of irrigated water to be viable. Increased corn prices have driven up food costs for people, and animals--cattle feed is more expensive now--which drives up beef prices. Beef tallow is an important ingredient in soap, and guess what, that's driving up soap prices. Palm oil is being imported as a substitute...which effects our balance of trade.

Farm land is pricier now, because, well you know....

But what about those ethanol refineries? When I was in Kansas this summer, I heard a local radio station broadcasting a speech from a chamber of commerce type explaining when an ethanol refinery is built near a small town, that means that a restaurant that closed a few years ago can re-open, high school kids have reason to stay in town when they graduate, town services improve....that sort of thing.

Well, according to a Tuesday New York Times article, those rural plants aren't so popular any more.

"It's like the dot-com industry," said Anne Yoder, who is pressing to stop plans for an ethanol plant outside Topeka, Kan., and describes herself
"not at all" as an activist but as "an ordinary soccer mom."

"When ethanol first came along there was so much promise," she said. "Maybe that's starting to trickle off."

This spring, when Ms. Yoder first began going door to door to her neighbors to describe her worries about a proposed facility, she expected to be dismissed by the many farmers in her rural county, who presumably would benefit from having a plant nearby to sell their corn.

"But I was shocked by what I heard," she said. "They don’t want it here either. Farmers have been in the business for hundreds of years and what they told me is that they don’t have a limitless supply of water to produce more corn anyway. This isn't as pretty a picture as everyone wants to make it out to be."

And via e-mail, Yoder communicates with other anti-ethanol activists.

Although it has to smell better than a meat processing plant, ethanol facilities also emit an odor, described by Wisconsinites as "like beer but with a metal smell mixed in."

Back to that farm in the picture. I took that photograph just north of the Oklahoma pandhandle--in the heart of the area that was devastated by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Such a catastrophe could happen again--especially if greed takes hold in the dry Great Plains.

Related posts:

My Kansas Kronikles, a 39 Post Series

Corn, ethanol, toilet paper, and Sheryl Crow

Technorati tags: ethanol biofuels corn palm oil Kansas energy farming dust bowl irrigation Great Plains