This line, from an article in the New York Times, about "food insecurity":
"At a moment when the country’s corn should be flourishing, one plant in 10 has not even emerged from the ground, the Agriculture Department said Monday."
Now, I SUPPOSE I am possibly reading that wrong, but, from where I sit, it looks like they're saying there's 90% germination of corn thus far.
I realize I'm not a farmer, just a plant ecologist, but if some of my research organisms had 90% germination - well, I'd be doing cartwheels up and down the hall.
(And I am quite sure farmers don't plant TO THE INDIVIDUAL PLANT what they need. Bugs in the soil probably take out more than 10% in a bad year).
(They also have, embedded later in the article, comments from a farmer who has a remarkably good wheat crop this year. But even that's not enough for the OH NOES crowd.)
One thing I will say? If this really IS an issue - if the corn crop is in fact going to be short - we should as a society SERIOUSLY consider if we actually want to be converting food into fuel. (And at any rate: cellulosic ethanol is far more efficient. I don't remember the exact ratio-of-yield but it seems to me that I've seen ratios that are about 2.5 times as efficient for ethanol made of cornstalks, switchgrass, or sugar cane as opposed to ethanol made of corn GRAIN. And we shouldn't be using land on which food crops can be grown to grow ethanol feed stock. Use the marginal land for that.
That is, if you HAVE to have ethanol in fuel. I'm coming more and more to the idea that it was a boondoggle designed to buy votes in places like Iowa than a for-real, for-true attempt at energy independence.
And I'm all for energy independence. I would love for our nation to be able to go to Saudi Arabia and say, "You don't want to boost production so prices drop? You say you can sell all your oil to China? Good luck with that!" and go on our merry ways and power our cars and planes and electrical plants and everything else with homegrown sources. I don't know that it's POSSIBLE but it is something I'd very much like to see. But I don't think using a costly, involved, and low-yielding process to convert food into something that can maybe be mixed with 85% gasoline [for most cars] is the best way to go...)
4 comments:
Ricki, my husband is a mechanic currently working in the field of alternative fuel sources, specifically converting fleets (mainly buses, garbage trucks & other government vehicles) to natural gas.
He agrees with you that this ethanol thing IS a boondoggle. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, or what is source is, but he claims that for ethanol to be a viable alternative for even 10% of the cars on the road across the country, something like 90% of the coutry would need to be covered in corn. My percentages might be slightly off, but I think I'm close. Plus, there is the point that you made that it STILL needs to be mixed with a large percentage of gasoline. How is this helping again?
It would make a lot more sense to focus on sugarcane-based ethanol...but sugarcane doesn't grow in as many congressional districts as does corn.
I had a co-worker start doing the panic thing on me this afternoon--of course, she started with, "Have you been watching the news lately?"
Groooooan.
Of course this story runs -- there's a REPUBLICAN in office, y'all. If Obama wins, corn will be raining from the sky and fuel prices -- even at $15 a gallon -- will be just fiiiiine.
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