Do We Need Ethanol More Than Topsoil?

Do We Need Ethanol More Than Topsoil?
Written by Dennis Avery
Wednesday, May 10, 2006


I cringe when the urban newspapers casually say that we can make “lots of our auto fuel” such as ethanol from cornstalks and wheat straw.

It ain’t so.

If we turn the crop stalks into ethanol, we’ll have the only problem that could be bigger than an energy shortage--a topsoil shortage. That would throw the First World’s societies into the same sort of downward hunger and erosion spiral that bad farming has already forced upon Africa.

The good news is that American farms are fully sustainable for the first time in history--precisely because they’re putting their crop residues back on the soil surface in no-till farming systems. The corn stalks and wheat straw form billions of tiny dams on the soil surface, which prevent howling winds and explosive raindrops from carrying soil particles away.
The stalks left on the soil surface in no-till farming also guarantee a year-round supply of food for subsoil microbes and earthworms. Thus the subsoil critters proliferate, aerating the soil, and permitting rainfall to sink in, rather than running off. That protects the crop roots from drought, even as it protects the streams from silt and pollution.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd lashed crop fields in Virginia with up to 19 inches of rain in 24 hours--and without any runoff or erosion on no-till fields. In the highly erodable Loess Hills of the upper Mississippi, soil erosion today is only 6 percent of what it was during the “black blizzards” of the 1930's Dust Bowl days, thanks largely to fertilizer, crop rotation, and low-till farming.

If we turn the crop stalks into ethanol, however, it’s back to serious erosion problems.

The current energy bill mandates the production of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year. That would force America to use 22 percent of its corn crop to supply 4 percent of its auto fuel--without bringing down the price of gasoline.

More @ http://tinyurl.com/ryxak chronwatch

Ethanol isn't even a stop-gap measure and it takes two gallons of energy to produce one gallon of ethanol. This is more slight of hand by the Fed's and the other usual suspects so that the public at large believes something is being done, when it isn't.

I cringe each time I see that public service commercial about 'yellow' and the cheery young people passing out 'yellow' teeshirts'. Talk about your propaganda for the great uninformed!

Hydrogen is the way to go, however the oil companies do not have a lock on that technology and besides there is still a quart of oil left in the 'big cat-box' and oil must make as much money as possible. Have all the oil lobby has huge numbers of politicians to buy off.