We’ve been lucky. Biofuels have been pushed off the front page by the financial crisis. There’s time for a collective re-think before they return. Lets hope we do it.
Before we do any more damage, lets start by utterly rejecting last fall’s nonsense that ethanol has no impact on the price of grain.
Here we finally are with an issue that puts agriculture onto more televisions than any other in recent memory. It’s the answer to a generation of prayers, yet we’re wasting it to defend a position that we know is unsustainable at best, and patently false at worst.
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Forget the biased studies. If we believe so staunchly that ethanol has no price impact, why does every ethanol project always start with bold estimates of how the new demand will drive up the region’s basis? As an uncle of mine said the other day: “I feel good about leaving this place to the boys. Ethanol is making it possible for them to farm.”
Sure, we can get into the DDG debate, but the fact is that ethanol is derived from grain starches, and the export of billions of litres of ethanol off the farm necessarily represents a huge diversion of ag resources.
More to the point, if ethanol grows as we hope and believe it will, surely it will have an impact on future supply-demand cycles, and an impact on prices too.
Or are we saying we believe we should only produce ethanol as long as the industry is small enough that it doesn’t affect pricing?
Farms are new again. That is our message to non-farmers. Farmers are harnessers of miracles, and with the help of science, they can help society meet myriad needs. Farmers have always grown food and they’ve always produced leather, wool and cotton, but now they can grow energy, and tomorrow they will be able to produce medicines and industrial products and much, much more, all of it vital to the people of this Earth.
What we need is a way to figure out which of these essential products to produce.
The way that farmers decide that is the market. This is the truth. We run from it at our peril. The market is history’s best mechanism for telling farmers what it’s most important that they grow.
Our argument should be, if ethanol boosts the price of grains, that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.
If it also drives home the point that agriculture operates with finite resources, that is victory. Agriculture’s interest has got to be long term, which means we must at all costs be honest with non-farmers.
It’s in everyone’s interest for non-farmers to realize that there is a finite amount of farmland, and a finite number of farmers, and if we’re going to survive on this planet, we had better start thinking how we can stop their loss.
Let me know what you think. I’m at 519 674-1449, or you can e-mail me at
