Ethanol or Topsoil?
By Dennis Avery
 I cringe when the urban newspapers casually say we can make "lots of our
auto fuel" 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 1930s 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.
The current subsidy is 51 cents per gallon of ethanol. However, since
ethanol contains 15 percent less energy than gasoline, the real subsidy is
77 cents per gallon worth of gasoline.
More to the point, America's farmers sold record amounts of corn last year
for corn flakes, tacos and livestock feed. With both population and
incomes rising, world demand for these items will more than double in the
next 40 years.
The world is already farming one-third of the Earth's land area, including
almost all of the land worth planting to crops.
If we burn the corn in our cars, what will we and the livestock eat?
In the long run, every gallon of ethanol produced in America is likely to
mean more soil erosion if it's made from crop stalks, or more forest
cleared if it's made from corn. We could cut the deforestation in half if
we made the ethanol from sugarcane, which produces ethanol far more
efficiently. But America can't grow sugarcane, except in the Florida
Everglades.
Let's face the environmental truth.
Humanity at the moment has only two ways to environmentally satisfy our
need for cost-effective energy. We can either burn fossil fuels, or burn
uranium in nuclear power plants. One produces CO2, the other doesn't.
If you believe CO2 causes global warming, you'll want to buy nuclear power.
If you doubt the safety of nuclear power plants, then you may want to buy
coal-fired electricity.
Please, please, however, don't use your vote or voice to support the
production of ethanol from crops and crop biomass. That would simply cause
more soil erosion and more deforestation across the broad expanse of the
Earth-without easing your crunch at the gas pump.
Dennis T. Avery, a former senior analyst for the State Department, is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute
and the Director for Global Food Issues at the Center for Global Food Issues.
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