Bio-fuels using corn may not be the answer

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports the largest corn crop ever this year - 13.3 billion bushels -to meet the nation's demand for ethanol-based fuel. Hats off to the hard work of many in our agriculture sector for stepping up to the plate. However, this surge has scientists and environmental advocates worried about the toll that expanding biofuel crops, such as corn, will have on land and waterŠand rightly so.

Farmers planted an extra 14 million acres of corn this year - equal to an area more than half the size of Indiana, and more growth is coming: The U.S. ethanol sector will need 2.6 billion bushels per year -nearly 50 percent more than in 2005 - by 2010, according to the USDA. The rush to farm more corn is a result of President Bush's call to produce 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuel by 2017, or about 15 percent of all U.S. liquid transportation fuel.

The National Academies' National Research Council (NRC), the top science review board in the U.S., has released a new report that fuels the concerns of environmentalists. The study, Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United States, warns that if the U.S. continues to expand corn-based ethanol production without new environmental protection policies, “the increase in harm to water quality could be considerable.” The results: more soil erosion, more pesticides and herbicides in waterways, more low-oxygen “dead zones” from fertilizer runoff and more local shortages in water for drinking and irrigation.

The environmental impacts of biofuel sources, such as corn and soy, have not been adequately factored into policy decisions that encourage biofuel production. Those impacts could include increases in water, fertilizer and pesticide use; downstream effects on rivers and estuaries; increased soil erosion; and depletion of aquifers.

These are aspects that have not been carefully considered in assessing whether biofuels are the way to go in the U.S. Overall, increasing corn production by 18 million acres - foreseeable soon given this year's 14 million acre increase - could result in a 33 percent increase in annual nitrogen loss from soil, according to the latest of the EPA panel's hypoxia report. EPA's hypoxia plan in the 1990s has failed to meet its goal of reducing the size of the dead zone. Conservation and environmental aspects of the action plan were trampled on the way to $3- and $4-a-bushel corn.

Some note that federal soil conservation programs, as well as EPA's hypoxia plan, focus on voluntary best management practices for farmers to reduce environmental impacts rather than stricter performance standards. In part, this is because it's difficult to monitor runoff from individual farms to demonstrate compliance with standards. A major improvement would suggest that this monitoring is possible if programs require states to conduct watershed-scale monitoring and representative sampling.

Fertilizer isn't the only potential problem. According to the NRC report, more pesticides are applied per hectare of corn than with other biofuel plants, such as soy or mixed-species perennial grasses. The report also notes that atrazine, a common herbicide used on corn, can wash into streams.

Atrazine use remained level through 2006, but “glyphosate use has gone up dramatically,” the report says. One reason is that corn farmers are switching from atrazine to glyphosate, sold under the trade name RoundUp, and are planting RoundUp Ready corn engineered to survive the herbicide while weeds die.

Glyphosate use has shot up from about 1-2 million pounds applied to corn and soy in the early to mid-1990s to 13 million pounds in 2005. It may behoove us to keep a closer eye on glyphosate entering into streams. The downside is that analysis costs are about $300 to analyze one water sample for glyphosate.

Underlying these issues is another problem - soil erosion, which accounts for up to half of the 1.5 billion metric tons of sediment dumped into U.S. waterways each year, carrying nutrients and farm chemicals. The USDA Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to keep 34 million acres - much of it highly erodible - out of use. But land is in high demand to grow more corn, and the USDA is expected to decide this fall whether to allow farmers to cancel contracts early, pulling up to 2.5 million acres out of the program to ease shortages. In addition, corn is considered poor for soil conservation, because it lacks the spreading roots that help perennial grasses hold soil. Tilling adds to that problem by loosening soil, but farmers argue that tilling is needed for seeds to germinate, or sprout, well.

Water use is another concern as corn expands into dry regions, like Texas, that require heavy irrigation. NRC predicts these impacts will be localized but potentially severe in some places. Ethanol production facilities can be water hogs, the report notes, using 3-5 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. This means an ethanol facility making 100 million gallons/

year uses about 400 million gallons of water - equivalent to water use by a small town of 10,000 people.

The future of biofuels may not lie with corn. The NRC report suggests that policies should promote the development of cellulosic biofuels from grasses or wood waste. Perennial prairie grasses, like switchgrass, hold great promise if done right. These plants produce less erosion, because they root well and aren't tilled and they need no or little fertilizer. However, USDA's latest report on cellulosic ethanol sends a message to farmers that there is little hope for a boom on the horizon. Granting that cellulosic fuel holds some longer-term promise and much research is needed to make it commercially economical. And even that target is a drop in the bucket compared with the 140 billion gallons of gasoline that Americans burn every year and the 6 billion gallons of ethanol already produced every year from corn.

Rumblings on the Hill suggest a variable subsidy for ethanol, a tactic that has been taken up by an Indiana senator. A sliding scale based on profitability would reduce taxpayer burden and discourage overexpansion funded on subsidies. Plus, the subsidy could be tied to performance standards that require environmental stewardship. Although the plan doesn't have strong support in Congress yet, the EU's European Council is working to define biofuel sustainability requirements, such as CO2 savings, as part of its plan to increase biofuels to 10 percent of transportation use by 2020.

The real answer may be the one that no one is willing to tackle, and that's the potential for conservation - using less fuel in the first place. What about creating upland game bird habitat that could bring over a billion dollars to our economy like South Dakota has? I apologize ... if I might just be making too much sense.