Quote:
Originally Posted by IndyIan
In my area I would guess that agricultural production could be increased by 100% easliy if it made economic sense to do it. Myself and 4 neighbors have 250 acres of unused fields and no one is knocking on our doors asking to rent them, and I'm nt pricing out a tractor to do it myself. This land is not prime farmland but it all was farmed in the recent past. Because modern industrial agriculture is so fuel dependent that I don't think farmers are coming out much ahead than they were before ethanol, especially on less than ideal land. Government subsidies had artificially lowered the price of corn to where it made sense to convert it to ethanol, now ethanol subsidies still promote corn being used even with a tripling in value.
Corn ethanol seems to be a disaster as a biofuel, corn is hard on the land, takes a huge amount of fertillizer, and is energy intensive to harvest and process. I do think that a process to utilize cellulouse could be implemented well with crops that produce well without so many energy inputs.
The final solution is just use a fraction of the energy we use now, then the demand for any fuel is less and biofuels can play a significant role without affecting food prices. Our consumption based society will finally be seen as unsustainable and we can work on being carbon neutral and nutrient neutral(sustainable agriculture, not industrial agriculture).
I imagine north america will be alot more like western europe which isn't so bad. Integrated public transportation and all that. The average family won't own 2 cars and won't need to.
Ian
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I couldn’t agree more. Right now it has become very fashionable to bash Bio-Fuels but it doesn’t make sense to me as I see a future of electric cars and vehicles that cant use electric running on bio-fuels. How else are we going to solve our CO2 problems?
Agricultural resources diverted to fuel production is not the problem, the problem is we have never properly applied the correct value to our resources. An article that I recently found states that the U.S. spent $611.3 billion between 2000 and 2005 on agricultural subsidies, that averages to $101.9/year (source
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=14305 ) and yet another source I found stated that ethanol subsidies were $7 billion for 2006 (source
http://zfacts.com/p/807.html ).
While corn to ethanol is really not the solution because it has an energy payback of 1.3:1, If you look into what Bio-D gets and Brazilian ethanol are getting it becomes much more promising (3:1 and well over 4:1) showing that Bio-Fuels actually will work. What current subsidies and regulations are doing is paving the way for future crops to hit the ground running.
It seems silly to complain about the $7 billion in subsides on ethanol compared to $101 billion the U.S. spends on agriculture and the $101 billion really shows that we have not been paying the market rate for food for a real long time. Where I am from there has been no money to be made in farming for 20 years. Where are the incentives to increase food production if there is no money to be made and why should farmers struggle just so people can have cheap food that they waste. We need to start pricing our resources properly and production will shift away from goods that we no longer need and to ones that we do.