Yes, it’s time to rethink ethanol

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I enjoyed Karen Tolkkinen’s fresh look at the ethanol situation (“The time is ripe to rethink ethanol,” Sept. 1). Yes, she writes with a tentative voice, obeying the rules for “Minnesota Nice.” Her perspective probably matches what most Minnesotans understand about this decades-old policy, sometimes called the ethanol mandate.

I’ve been studying the ethanol program since Minnesota financed the opening of 13 plants in the 1990s. As an adjunct professor in the University of Minnesota’s executive Management of Technology program, I delivered a series of lectures centered on the theme “How do you raise the price of corn 25 cents a bushel and stabilize Minnesota’s rural economy?”

I was on the stage at the Sept. 1, 2004, Iowa Farm Progress show behind President George W. Bush when he announced, “I believe in ethanol and biodiesel!” His support for corn-based ethanol would carry Iowa, a state he’d lost in 2000, by a 0.67% margin. Today, the energy policy established in 2006 mandates the use of 15 billion gallons of ethanol in our fuel annually.

Over the past 20 years, hundreds of academic studies have assessed the upside but more often the downside of ethanol. I outlined many of these findings in a previous opinion (“Shifty motives, suspicious minds: What a majority of scientists believe, a large contingent of the public doesn’t buy,” Sept. 14, 2017). A recent University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin intensive study, endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences, yet again underlines the harmful footprint ethanol stamps on our environment. Tolkkinen’s discovery that it’s time to rethink ethanol is more relevant than she realizes.

Ethanol is vital to Minnesota’s rural economy. But it’s not really ethanol; it’s corn. Since the 2006 mandate, corn acres in Minnesota and North Dakota have more than doubled, at the sacrifice of growing edible foods such as pulse crops. The corn-soybean rotation has been bioengineered to produce record yields nearly independent of weather and pest variations. Agribusiness feeds off the farmer, who is obliged to buy new seeds and chemicals each year to produce a record yield, paradoxically driving commodity prices low for the processors. Corn farmers are squeezed between the bioengineering seed companies like Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta and the giant commodity processors such as Cargill and ADM.

Somehow, the questioning of ethanol is considered an attack on farmers. But it’s not. The farmers are so caught up in Big Ag’s vicious production monopoly that they have few options except to get big or get out, a 1973 farm bill theme still relevant today. Conditions are rapidly evolving like those that led to the two previous farm crises of the 1920s and 1980s. These led to nearly 50% of small farms being lost. Losing more farms in rural Minnesota will not benefit farmers, consumers or taxpayers.

There are ideas, good ideas, to guide Midwest farming away from the corn-soybean rotations. These start by adopting practices that regenerate the soil. But there is a switching cost for the farmer. Our new farm bill must support this. It will not be supported by the Big Ag conglomerate and its propaganda organizations. There’s little incentive for them in lower yields, cleaner water and healthier foods.

Now, I want to address the response from the Renewable Fuels Association to Tolkkinen’s article (Readers Write, Sept. 7).

First, one might question whether distillers grain (the byproduct of corn ethanol) is a good source of animal feed. Like almost every step in the ethanol program, one thing leads to a necessary fix. Cheap corn is needed to compete against oil, requiring yields to increase, leading to a massive addition of chemicals and fertilizers, of which a significant percentage ends up in the Mississippi River, which has yet to be fixed. The CO₂ exhaust from ethanol processing must be sequestered, leading to a plan to install thousands of miles of pipelines to transport a liquefied state of it into deep caverns in North Dakota. And the distillers grain fed to animals leads to product problems such as mastitis in the milk and beef more quickly becoming rancid. These effects are fixed by adding supplements.

When I worked in technology, we often had products that needed improvements. We cleverly devised these fixes and implemented them to find that frequently another patch was required. Eventually, it became unwieldy to maintain all these fixes, and a rethinking was done, leading to a better product and a higher value. It is time to rethink the ethanol program.

Second, the ethanol program has little to do with food security. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter gave ethanol its first boost. Big Ag processors pushed through a subsidy as part of an energy bill to make America less dependent on foreign oil. George W. Bush had a similar motive. “The corn crop is up and we’re less dependent on foreign energy” — another phase from that farm program speech I attended. And Bush’s program grew to become a government-subsided multibillion-dollar industry that, for a while, became a play doll on Wall Street. Why invest in risky free markets when there’s a government-subsidized guaranteed market? As my father once said, Democrats start programs, and Republicans make them bigger.

Yes, some of that field corn is used in our food, less than 5%. The two main products are high-fructose corn syrup and corn chips. (I often remember the satirical article in the Onion praising Doritos for reaching 1 million ingredients.) Nutritionists have come out strongly against these heavily processed foods, even not wanting them labeled as food.

The Renewable Fuels Association was formed shortly after President Carter’s ethanol policy. It’s been around for a long time. Its primary purpose seems not to promote as much as defend the ethanol industry. The aggressively damning style attacking Tolkkinen is a clear reflection of that strategy. And it’s not just journalists the association demeans, but also academic researchers. More of its attention is devoted to lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency and against Big Oil, and then, sometimes, it joins the EPA in lawsuits with oil refineries. Any attack is progress and probably rewarded internally. It’s not an organization prone to rethinking.

When President Abraham Lincoln established the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he described it as the Department of the People. This is more than the 20,914 Minnesota ethanol workers. It’s time for the people to have a conversation about ethanol.

James Lenz works in industrial research and development and taught in the University of Minnesota’s Executive MOT program from 1988 to 2003.