Corn: Food VS Fuel

In Plan B Brown says that the amount of corn needed to produce enough fuel for an SUV is enough corn to feed one person for a whole year.  I find biofuels to be really fascinating, but now after hearing that I am disappointed as well.  My dad works for an agriculture feed company that relies very heavily on corn.   The corn is used to make feed for turkeys, which in turn will feed humans.   Corn is very difficult to grow and harvest successfully.  It is also expensive to grow, lots of fertilizer, irrigation costs, and lots of manual labour for harvesting, even with combines someone has to operate them.  As Rees and Wackerngal say “ while modern agriculture produces more output per farmer,  than traditional agriculture , it requires much more energy, materials and water per unit crop”. 

The corn harvest has to take place around the same time every year, during fall months.   If the season is dry, the corn is too dry, it can’t be used for the feed.  If the corn is to wet, the same thing, it cannot be used for feed.  This year has been particularly bad for the corn farmers.  My dad says there is a very narrow range of usable corn that they can actually use for feed.  If they cannot use the corn, they keep it stored in silos, and blend with better quality corn to make feed.  If they can still not process the corn, different farmers and companies can come pick it up to convert to different corn products including flour, different food products and even bio-ethanol.

I really don’t know much about bio-fuels, in theory they sound great and natural.  But I am not sure if they are sustainable if it takes a year’s worth of corn to feed one person to fill one tank of an SUV.  I am all for sustainable fuel, but I don’t agree with taking away from food for humans, and feed for livestock. 

Brown says that “even in a good year the state [of Iowa] only harvests 2.2 billion bushels. As distilleries compete for grain also used to feed livestock and poultry, Iowa could become a corn deficit state- with no corn to export to the rest of the world.”  Would that really be so bad?  Wouldn’t it be most beneficial to harvest to support locally, one of the ways that Rees and Wackernagel suggest to reduce Our Ecological Footprint is by buying locally grown food.  So why not buy locally made fuels as well.  What if each state or province produced enough to sustain themselves, then we would not need to worry about the importing and exporting costs. 

I am not anti-trade, as  “Ecological Footprint is not anti- trade per se. However it examines trade through and ecological lens and and reveals it’s environmental consequences”.   I think we should support local farmers, rather than exporting world wide, it costs more to export than the corn is worth, which is why the price inflates.