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| ▲ | triceratops 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ethanol corn is the same as the corn grown for animal feed. https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fu... It isn't human-grade corn. | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Er… it’s the same corn used to make corn syrup, corn flakes, and many other things. It’s just not sweet corn like you’d eat with corn on the cob. | |
| ▲ | Cytobit 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Massively inefficient approach to "food security". Burn fossil fuels to grow animal fodder, feed and raise animals, wtf. Huge amounts of energy lost at each stage of that process. | | |
| ▲ | jfengel 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that. They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein. So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol. | | |
| ▲ | Brian_K_White 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies. What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for. And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw. | | |
| ▲ | sfink 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol. Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need. (Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.) | |
| ▲ | triceratops 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But what is this system trying to secure against? America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop. And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten. |
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| ▲ | margalabargala 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Food availability is orders of magnitude higher than needed to feed all humans. Efficiency isn't an issue. Any hunger is an economic and logistical problem not a production problem. | | |
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| ▲ | Teever 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals isn't it more accurate to say that they're feeding the animals to make money? |
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| ▲ | quickthrowman 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s not sweet corn, but it’s still edible. It could be ground into cornmeal or corn flour and consumed by humans in the event of a global food supply chain collapse. I’d rather eat cornmeal than starve or have to invade Canada to get wheat or whatever. Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away. Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security. | | |
| ▲ | sfink 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Corn subsidies are a few billions of dollars a year, that’s pretty cheap for food security. A few billions a year to destroy farming capacity in the rest of the world, and even within our country for growing anything non-corn (because it has to compete with subsidized ethanol production). You could get more benefit and do less harm by using those billions to maintain production capacity for other crops (even if you're not even growing anything but a cover crop!), plus generate far more energy from solar production. I'd say it's pretty expensive for food insecurity plus opportunity cost. > Ethanol in gasoline is food security policy that exists to have something to use the corn for rather than throw it away. That's just false. The mandate (The Renewable Fuel Standard) forces ethanol production. The law says you have to overproduce. If we wanted to preserve capacity, we wouldn't grow the corn, we'd subsidize maintaining the ability to grow it -- and other crops -- which would be way cheaper and also provide more food security. | |
| ▲ | triceratops 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Preserving farmland and maintaining a one- or two-year reserve supply of crucial cereals makes sense for food security. In the event of a global food crisis, getting fallow land under plow should be relatively straightforward. It isn't like manufacturing where the skills and jobs and factories just went overseas. Farmers and farming aren't going away. Needlessly growing corn degrades farmland. That's the opposite of food security. |
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| ▲ | megaman821 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Between the ethanol and the animal feed, we are encouraging growing way more corn than is needed for food security. | |
| ▲ | sfink 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nope, that's the cover story. The US subsidizes production, not capacity, which results in lots of excess crop that gets dumped on the market and depresses prices and impoverishes competitors. The ethanol mandates were created partly as a response to the problems that this created. But they are mandates for blending in a certain amount of ethanol, producing artificial demand, and putting us in the ridiculous situation where 40% of corn production goes to ethanol that nobody needs. It's the dumbest thing ever and makes no sense, but is very popular with farm states for obvious reasons. If we actually wanted to maintain spare production capacity, it would look very different. We'd have to pay to keep land capable of growing food even when not growing any. We'd subsidize the inputs (irrigation, drainage, soil) instead of the outputs. We'd avoid overproduction instead of encouraging it, since it's a form of "inflation" that lowers prices and drives out farmers (other than the ones printing money... er, growing unneeded corn). | |
| ▲ | oatmeal1 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If food security were a motivating factor in policy, we would be diversifying away from corn, because drought and aquifer depletion are threatening the ability to continue to grow it. | |
| ▲ | boc 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles. | | |
| ▲ | DavidPeiffer 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | (Iowan) We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley). |
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| ▲ | tombert 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the theoretical idea is that we want to ensure that there is always a very large domestic corn supply, in the event of war or something. Corn is a crop that has a lot of uses; it can be refined into sugar, it can be used as flour, it's relatively energy dense food-wise, and it can be fairly easily converted into fuel if necessary. I'm not saying I fully agree with the reasoning but I at least kind of get it. | | |
| ▲ | testaccount28 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel. it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do. |
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| ▲ | jmclnx 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would say it is even worse, it is a scam to feed $ to the rich due to Gov subsidizes. Plus, IIRC, ethanol is used as a way to make people think it is OK to use fossil fuels allowing the oil industry to point to these farms. Plus I heard too high an ethanol mixture can damage your engine, thus adding to "planned obsolescence". | |
| ▲ | dotcoma 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor -- MLK |
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