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Kettle Moraine, WI | In a round about way you made the food argument of the ethanol debate.
That acre of standing corn could make a lot more food than ethanol plus coproducts. And that manure generated could make electricity or natural gas to add to it. Or pump the corn silage into a digester and make a lot of energy and coproduct of fertilizer returned to grow more carbon via the next corn crop with some nitrogen loss but returning all the p and k to the field.
A load of distillers isn't human edible food but upstream it could have been or the crop could have been different. A corn farmer wants to grow corn because that's what they do. A lightly informed consumer is shown all the possibilities of what can be grown or solar paneled.
Cost of things is also a way to get the core of what food costs because it encompasses real cost and profit along the way. 1 pound of ground pork costs $4 a pound for easy figuring. It has 1350 calories, 100g fat, 120g protein. A pound of wheat flour has 1650 calories, 5g fat, and 50g protein. The pound of wheat flour costs 48 cents per pound. Not a perfect balance but there is a 8x chasm to bridge making some monumental reasoning to get there
Informed consumers catch on to things and I want good arguments to make the case for ethanol because many talking points fall hard upon inspection. Thankfully the average consumer doesn't look deeper to common points. | |
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Our end users mind set is subtlety swayed.
