Food costs are up and some people seem to want to blame corn farmers. The blame is probably coming from the petroleum lobby, because people who know a lot more about corn and markets than me can tell you that if anything, there is a surplus of corn. If the price of corn isn’t high because of unnatural market manipulation or speculation, than it’s high because the price of diesel and gas that corn growers need for tractors and trucking.One of the things that the oil companies don’t want us to understand. Corn ethanol/alcohol is made from the starch and sugar in corn. Cows are biologically and anatomically incapable of digesting those corns and sugars. A Cow’s 4-part stomach is specifically designed to design fiber or cellulose.
The starch and sugar goes in one end and out the other. Crap! What a waste of potential energy!
I am less worried about Iowa farmers sending too much corn to ethanol plants than I am about Brazilian farmers plowing under the Amazon rainforest to plant corn that competes with Americans for market share. Less rainforest means less oxygen producing trees and more carbon dioxide, less ozone, more climate change etc. etc. etc. Not to mention less money for Iowa farmers, and more Brazilians driving more cars etc. etc.
But if we’re still worried about sending too much corn to ethanol instead of food products, animal feeds, and the myriad of other industrial uses, there’s always switch grass.
According to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, switch grass “grows fast, capturing lots of solar energy and turning it into lots of chemical energy— cellulose—that can be liquefied, gasified, or burned directly. It also reaches deep into the soil for water, and uses the water it finds very efficiently.” They say it is one of the best crops for protecting the soil and preventing erosion AND, it filters more carbon dioxide out of the air than most crops.
But corn and switch grass are not the only plants that could be used as oil alternatives. Cattails, that’s right, cattails, also known as bullrush or reedmace has all kinds of environmentally friendly uses. Many cities use cattails to process their sewage. Cattails filter out nitrates not only from human waste, but from fertilizer run off. I think that cattails might be a great landscaping idea for big hog operations.
They’re also incredibly valuable as wild life habitat. Hunters have to love that. Cattails are a high starch plant, so once they’ve done their job cleaning the water, they can be harvested and processed into ethanol just like corn and switch grass. What makes it even better is that it’s a perennial, so farmers wouldn’t have to keep buying seed and replanting it every year.
One of the problems that waste water and runoff is causing is something you may have heard about in the news called “dead zones.” Dead zones are large areas of ocean where plants and fish and other life forms can no longer survive, either from pollution to that area, or from rising average water temperatures. A great solution could be kelp. Kelp is an amazing plant, basically a type of algae that can grow several stories tall under sea.
Like cattails, kelp cleans the water it’s in. Like the rainforest, kelp uses tons of carbon dioxide while producing tons of oxygen. Like corn, switch grass, and cattails, kelp provides incredible habitat for animals, which commercial fishermen would benefit from. Deliberately planted or farmed kelp can bring life back to dead zones. And what very few people realize is that, like corn, switch grass, and cattails, kelp can be made into ethanol.
Republicans are demanding that Congress open more coastlines to off shore oil exploration, but the oil companies already lease 90 million acres to do that and they are not doing it on 70 million of those acres. Why should they be allowed to risk more ecological damage when they refuse to drill where they are?
Could it be because it’s in their best interest to keep supplies low so that prices remain high, insuring their continued record profits? Who would want to scare us into believing that inflation of food prices is the corn farmers fault? People who want us to remain dependant on oil.
Especially when new drilling would only reduce the price of gas by a couple of cents a gallon and not for a decade or more anyway, more off shore drilling is not the answer. Turning to environmentally friendly fuel alternatives including ethanol, geo-thermal, solar and wind would not only be better stewardship of the environment, it would create millions of jobs- just like the New Deal, WWI, the railroads, or the internet all did. That would mean that green fuels would benefit the whole economy for at least twenty to forty years. Most importantly it would reduce our reliance on foreign oil, making Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela far less important. Best of all, it would benefit Iowa agriculture if we’re smart enough to pursue it aggressively.
Even if you think that global warming and climate change are nothing more than Chicken Little panicking about the sky caving in, “green energy” like corn ethanol is still a great idea.
