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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
Corn is very fertilizer intensive (it is the "SUV" of farm crops!). And rather than pay for (expensive) crop insurance, many farmers use 2X the fertilizer recommended -- so, something like 200 pounds per acre?
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That's a business decision. If the price of artificial fertilizers &c go up due to rising oil prices, the farmers will look at ways to use less. Consider recent interest in no-till farming methods, for instance.
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Fertilizer is made from natural gas.
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Not necessarily. Mine's made by the neighbors' horses :-)
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Do the GMF corn seeds take energy to grow?
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No more than any other seed. That's really the whole point of plants, you know. They grow by capturing energy from sunlight.
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The tractor burns diesel usually, and it has to be used to prepare the soil (plow and harrow)...
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Again, these are business decisions. Diesel fuel, pesticides, and artifical fertilizers have been relatively cheap, as a consequence of cheap oil, and that economic fact has shaped the way farmers do things. But those technques aren't laws of nature: change the underlying economics (expensive oil), and the methods will change.
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Switchgrass is a native plant, and it doesn't need very much energy investment.
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Corn is/was a native plant, too, before the Olmec/Maya/Aztec biotechnologists started tinkering with its genome. So what might happen with your native switchgrass or jatophra, once people start doing a bit of selective breeding? Then you have the whole spectrum of problems that arise when you try to grow monocultures of anything...
Once you actually start thinking about some of this stuff, it's nowhere near as clear-cut as some would like to think, but OTOH there are a lot more possibilities.