In the news: Cullen A (2024) Corn Belt fertilizer is killing the Gulf of Mexico. Washington Post. About 30 percent of the nitrogen applied for raising corn is lost to water, and much of it right now is draining off in the spring rise. All that detritus, the tons upon tons of soil with phosphorous mixed in, float downstream past St. Louis, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, suffocating the Gulf of Mexico for the sake of corn, wheat, cotton and rice. They call it the Dead Zone, where almost nothing can live. The shrimp spawning in the brackish Louisiana marshes can’t find their way to deeper water to mature. Smaller shrimp fetch less for the shrimpers. The economic loss from gulf hypoxia is estimated at up to $2.4 billion per year.
It’s a bad combo: Bare Iowa soil in spring. Increasingly extreme weather with torrents of rain. Underground tiles, installed by farmers to help drain their cornfields and keep crops dry, are everywhere now in northwest Iowa — the drainage capacity has doubled since 1980. The effluent from these tiles pours into to the Raccoon River, swelling from the spring flush. The Raccoon runs southeast in Iowa, joins the Des Moines River, then feeds the Mississippi, which feeds the gulf and stunts the shrimp.
Methane is cheap in the gulf, where oil and gas derricks line the horizon. We ship the gas upstream to Iowa, where it is processed into anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer. Farmers inject it in the soil to feed the corn that feeds the hogs that create the phosphorus in their manure. It flushes down the Raccoon all over again.
We hooch nearly half our corn crop not into food or feed but into ethanol for cars, which is why we plant up to the last inch of the creek side and river bank. We wear suspenders with our belts for a bumper crop — we dump manure on top of the commercial anhydrous ammonia to get that next marginal bushel of corn. It’s killing us, or at least killing the gulf. The Raccoon River ran clean before 1980, when the Farm Bill was changed to maximize production, according to Jerry Hatfield, agronomist and former director of the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment at Iowa State University, and farmers began planting fencerow to fencerow.
The Green Gold Rush to make biodiesel has begun in earnest in California. It would not be profitable without subsidies from LCFS credits, federal RIN D5 credits, and Blenders Tax Credits at $3.32 a gallon, which is enough to cover production costs, according to Van der Wal, biofuel advisor at Stratas Advisors in Singapore.
He said “It’s a mind-boggling amount of money, you will make a lot of money as long as all these subsidies come in.” Without this money, biodiesel is an energy sink, with very low EROI.
Biodiesel competitors already in the market have already locked up much of the tallow, cooking oil, and other resources Marathon and Phillips hope to use (Bloomberg 2021). And California doesn’t grow many soybeans because of water shortages, so importing soy will increase CO2 via transportation emissions here and the CO2 from tractors and trucks in other countries or the U.S.
Corn and soybeans are very destructive to the environment, eroding more topsoil, causing more pollution, global warming, acidification, eutrophication of water, water treatment costs, fish kills, and biodiversity loss than most other crops (Powers 2005, Troeh and Thompson 2005, Zattara and Aizen2019).
Food versus fuel. Over 40% of the corn crop becomes fuel, not food at a time when 43 million Americans need help with food stamps (USDA 2020) and the high unemployment rate from Covid-19 could drive the need for food aid up to over 54 million people (Lee 2020).
Too many pesticides. Corn and soy are especially destructive because they need a lot of pesticides. Of all pesticide use on crops, corn’s share is 39.5% and soybeans 22% (Mclaughlin and Walsh 1998, Padgitt et al. 2000, Pimentel 2003, Patzek 2004, Fernandez-Cornejo et al. 2014). I don’t want to say they have a drinking problem, but shall we say they have a “dependency problem.” All these pesticides kill bees, wild bees, and other important pollinators. The neonic pesticides mentioned earlier that are 48 times more toxic to insect life than other chemicals are mainly used on corn and soybeans (DiBartolomeis et al. 2019).
Corn and soy already take up half of U.S. cropland. Corn and soy are grown on over half of America’s 324 million acres of cropland (USDA 2018). Over half!
Corn can yield 500 gallons of ethanol per acre (NRC 2014, USDA 2019). That sounds like a a lot, but corn fuel is small potatoes. Despite a doubling of corn acreage due to the 2007 federal renewable fuel standard, the 40% of corn grown to make ethanol is a measly 10% of our U.S. gasoline mix. In the case of diesel, 99% of what we use is petroleum diesel, and 1% percent is biodiesel. So even if all 324 million acres of American farmland were planted in corn and soybeans, they’d barely make a dent in transportation fuels while driving food and feed prices higher.
Corn and soy cause the most soil erosion. Corn and soy are 50 or more times more prone to soil erosion than sod crops like wheat, barley, rye, and oats. Why is that? It’s because they are planted in rows much wider than other crops, up to 30 inches wide, a major highway for wind and water to barrel along and take topsoil with them (Al-Kaisi 2000, Sullivan 2004). This is exacerbated by heavy harvesting equipment that compacts and pulverizes soil into a fine powder that is more easily eroded and blown or washed away (RCN 2011, Mathews 2014).
Nevertheless, a corn ethanol goldrush is on. Farmers converted 10 million acres of grassland, shrubland, wetland, and forestland into cropland between 2008 and 2016, with 2.9 million acres for corn and 2.6 million acres for soy (Lark et al. 2018).
Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands are protected because they retain water, support pest predators, sequester carbon, and sustain wildlife. CRP land is highly-erodible if farmed. In fact, the government pays farmers not to grow crops on this land. When ethanol subsidies or corn prices are high, CRP land is often converted to corn crops. In 2007, 36.7 million acres were enrolled in the CRP program, today it’s just 21.9 million acres, a loss of nearly 15 million acres.
Using CRP and undeveloped land to grow corn erases the carbon benefits of using ethanol over gasoline (Uri 2000, Tomson 2007, Searchinger et al. 2008, Fargione et al. 2008, Piñeiro et al. 2009). After the harvest, most farmers leave their soil bare, except for a minority who plant cover crops or leave corn stover on the ground. This naked soil lies unprotected from wind and heavy rain that grab soil, sediment, pesticides, and fertilizer, running away with them.
A lot of soil is lost – 20 to 40 pounds per gallon of ethanol according to Jerald L. Schnoor, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa (NRC 2014).
Since 16 billion gallons of ethanol are produced per year, that’s 160 to 320 million tons of topsoil lost. An acre of topsoil 6-7 inches deep weighs 1,000 tons, so if soil were lost in just one area, as happened in the massive Midwestern floods of 2019 (Philpott 2019, Ippolito and Al-Kaisi 2019), 250 to 500 square miles of topsoil would be strip mined to the subsoil bones below. But such disastrous floods are uncommon. Usually a fraction of an inch is lost across the 127,800 square miles planted in corn, such a small amount we don’t notice. But year by year, erosion adds up, subtracting from the land. As detailed in Chapter 16, topsoil is eroding all over the world, and affects up to half of America’s agricultural soil, a peril to future food and the environment (Pimentel 2005).
Corn and soybeans are water hogs (sorry pigs). It takes some 3,600 gallons of water to produce enough soybeans to make a quarter gallon of biodiesel, and 680 gallons of water per liter of ethanol (Gerbens-Leenes et al. 2009). You knew that, right? Afterwards, for every gallon of ethanol produced, 12 gallons of noxious sewage effluent are released that need to be treated (Schulz 2007).
Corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are not good options for the arid states of the West. Nor for California. To make just 20% of the 16 billion gallons of ethanol produced a year in the U.S. in California would require over 8 trillion gallons out of the 8.4 trillion gallons of irrigation water now used to grow over 400 kinds of crops. Soybeans would need more water than California has available (Maupin et al. 2014). As it is, field crops like corn, soy, and cotton are draining California’s aquifers more than water intensive alfalfa, truck crops, and fruit and nut crops (Levy et al. 2020). For generations now in California, there have been fights over water between agriculture, cities, the environment, and fisheries (Fingerman et al. 2008). Thank you kindly, but please don’t plant your biofuel plantations in my home state of California!
Corn’s dirty secret – that corn ethanol is not a public good – is well known. Many papers have shown that it takes about one calorie of fossil fuel to make a calorie of ethanol (e.g. Pimentel 2003, Murphy et al. 2010). This is known even in the halls of the U.S. Congress, which has created a pork barrel for corn and soy farmers. Both the House and Senate have tried many times to repeal or reduce the amount of ethanol called for in the Renewable Fuel Standard. Yet the federal mandate that U.S. transportation fuels have a minimum volume of biofuel remains. In 2020, the mandate is 11.56% biofuels by volume. Here is a list of just a few failed congressional reform bills: HR 424 (2011), S 1584 (2015), HR703 (2015), HR 119 (2017), HR 1314 (2017), HR 104 (2019), HR 3427 (2019). (Source: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11353)
More fertilizer, more dead zones. Corn also uses more nitrogen fertilizer than most crops (Padgitt et al. 2000, Pimentel 2003, NRC 2003), and significant amounts of phosphorus. Corn needs a lot of fertilizer because corn plants are quite adept at absorbing nitrogen and storing it in the corn grain. But unfortunately, much of the nitrogen fertilizer applied doesn’t go into the grain but instead washes away into lakes, rivers and the ocean (NRC 2014).
Fertilizer runoff is also the main culprit causing dead zones such as the 6,000 to 7,000 square miles of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones develop when overloads of nutrients – nitrogen and phosphorus – allow algae to go on a nutrient binge, proliferating to the point they suck the oxygen out of the water. Any fish, shrimp, and crabs in this zone die, especially bottom dwelling fish, shrimp, clams, mussels, and oysters. Those that live can accumulate algal toxins that concentrate in shellfish, herring, mackerel, and sardines near the bottom of the food chain making them potentially lethal.
Industrial farming is great for jellyfish. Not being harmed, and in fact ballooning in numbers, are jelly fish. They are on the way to dominating the ocean and displacing fish. Despite the fact that they have no backbones! Jellyfish can handle hypoxia (low oxygen levels), love warmer climate-changed oceans, and proliferate thanks to trawling, overfishing, fertilizer and sewage runoff. We’re tipping the ocean ecosystem to favor jellyfish, possibly permanently. And they’re awfully hard to kill. Chemical repellents, biocides, nets, electric shocks, and introducing species that eat jellyfish won’t do it. If you shoot, stab, slash, or chop off part of a jellyfish, it can regenerate lost body parts within two days. Not even the past five major extinction events that killed up to 96% of life on earth drove jellyfish extinct (Gershwin 2013). I couldn’t find a jellyfish cookbook. You could create the first!
Somebody send the Bat Signal! Healthy topsoil and fresh water are essential for our future national security, indispensable if we are to grow biomass for food, infrastructure, and energy. Yet the U.S. exports 112,000 barrels per day of fuel ethanol causing erosion, water depletion, pollution, and eutrophication of waterways in our own country (EIA 2019).
If only Batman could save us from these polluting, erosion-prone, aquifer draining supervillain crops that take up half our crop land. Better yet, don’t send Batman, send bats to eat crop pests and lower pesticide use. Please write your representatives to repeal the renewable fuel standard and drive a wooden stake through the vampire ethanol industry. We are just trading petroleum for an equal amount of alcohol, with no net effect except losing a huge amount of our most precious resource. Soil!
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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