5 ms·

Corn is grown for food security as far as I'm aware. Corn ethanol fuel is just an outlet so that the corn grown doesn't go to waste.

boc 6mo ago
It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles.
- DavidPeiffer 6mo ago
  (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).
megaman821 6mo ago
Between the ethanol and the animal feed, we are encouraging growing way more corn than is needed for food security.
triceratops 6mo ago
Ethanol corn is the same as the corn grown for animal feed. https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fuel-facts/ https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fu... It isn't human-grade corn.
- Cytobit 6mo ago
  What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food.
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    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.
    - margalabargala 6mo ago
      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.
      - bitmasher9 6mo ago
        Efficiency is a long term issue, especially water efficiency.
    - jfengel 6mo ago
      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 6mo ago
        That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
        Brian_K_White 6mo ago
        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.
  - Teever 6mo ago
    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?
    - andriy_koval 6mo ago
      > Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals this statement is very disputable. What alternatives are available in your opinion?
      - Teever 6mo ago
        Producing and eating less animals. I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it. The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet. I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
        andriy_koval 6mo ago
        > health consequences of a meat heavy diet. my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat. As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
        Teever 6mo ago
        This is very true, but unfortuantely most people don't have portion control and they don't eat the right lean unprocessed meat. I'm skeptical that we can grow meat with significantly reduced environmental consequences. Like unless you're talking about some technologically advanced and not yet ready for mass production lab grown meat kind of thing it will always be more ecologically friendly and cheaper to just grow food that humans eat instead of growing food for animals to eat which are then eaten by animals. That thermodynamic reality just isn't going to change.
- quickthrowman 6mo ago
  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 6mo ago
    > 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 6mo ago
    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.
- trollbridge 6mo ago
  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.
oatmeal1 6mo ago
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.
sfink 6mo ago
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).

boc 6mo ago

It's mostly done because Iowa hosts (arguably) the most important primary election for presidential cycles.

DavidPeiffer 6mo ago
(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).

megaman821 6mo ago

Between the ethanol and the animal feed, we are encouraging growing way more corn than is needed for food security.

triceratops 6mo ago

Ethanol corn is the same as the corn grown for animal feed. https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fuel-facts/ https://iowarfa.org/ethanol-center/ethanol-facts/food-and-fu... It isn't human-grade corn.

Cytobit 6mo ago
What do you think they are feeding the animals for? To make food.
- triceratops 6mo ago
  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.
  - margalabargala 6mo ago
    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.
    - bitmasher9 6mo ago
      Efficiency is a long term issue, especially water efficiency.
  - jfengel 6mo ago
    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 6mo ago
      That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
      - Brian_K_White 6mo ago
        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.
- Teever 6mo ago
  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?
  - andriy_koval 6mo ago
    > Given that there are significantly cheaper, healthier and more efficient alternatives to eating animals this statement is very disputable. What alternatives are available in your opinion?
    - Teever 6mo ago
      Producing and eating less animals. I don’t mean to sound glib but that’s all there is to it. The juice from animal husbandry just isn’t worth the squeeze if you look at the cascading consequences of environmental and health consequences of a meat heavy diet. I eat meat. A lot of meat. Far too much, but I acknowledge that it isn’t good and that I need to change.
      - andriy_koval 6mo ago
        > health consequences of a meat heavy diet. my research and lots of experiments on myself say that there are positive consequences, and there is no much negative consequences if focus on lean unprocessed meat. As for "cascading consequences of environmental", I also think there is a way to grow meat with reduced consequences.
        Teever 6mo ago
        This is very true, but unfortuantely most people don't have portion control and they don't eat the right lean unprocessed meat. I'm skeptical that we can grow meat with significantly reduced environmental consequences. Like unless you're talking about some technologically advanced and not yet ready for mass production lab grown meat kind of thing it will always be more ecologically friendly and cheaper to just grow food that humans eat instead of growing food for animals to eat which are then eaten by animals. That thermodynamic reality just isn't going to change.
quickthrowman 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
  > 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 6mo ago
  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.
trollbridge 6mo ago
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.

oatmeal1 6mo ago

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.

sfink 6mo ago

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).