Here in Nebraska (home to a lot of corn, cattle and ethanol…) the biofuel mandate issue is totally misrepresented by people that don’t get how the industry works. Corn grown on our farms is primarily animal feed and not used directly for human feed. When cattle eat corn mist of what they digest is the protein in it. The rest is well… “passed through” (cow sh!+)

When they use this same field corn for making ethanol, the process converts the carbohydrates that they cattle can’t digest into alcohol, and leaves the “distillers grains” (or “corn gluten”) which is an ideal cattle feed as it is crazy high in protein and readily digestible. The same amount of grain that would be fed to cattle is able to feed the same amount of cattle PLUS they get the ethanol. Furthermore it is such a good feed that they can mix it with lower grade forage such as corn stocks/husks that they can get from the fields after harvest, instead of devoting additional acres to growing feed. Most ethanol plants also run this distillers grains through a process to remove the oil which can be used for all sorts of uses… cooking, biodiesel…

It is not a “food OR fuel” dilemma, but rather a “food AND fuel” thing.

Another thing. All the corn that we produce here that gets made into ethanol… we’re these plants shut down it would bankrupt hundreds of communities, school districts, county governments… and there would no way to move all this grain out on existing infrastructure as the rail capacity is not there. Ethanol is way more “dense” than the corn. It takes around 28 rail cars of corn (3,500 bushels) to make 1 rail car of ethanol (30,000 gallons) with 2.8 gallon from each bushel. It’s the same reason why settlers in Appalachia used to make moonshine to transport their harvest to market through the mountains… it would only exasperate the already FUBAR transport system and lead to a lot of corn going to waste waiting for train to haul it to markets… that’s assuming those markets exist.