Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

Don:
.

> Another figure is that to replace the gasoline we use would take 71% of all 
> the available crop land.  Not just corn growing but all the crop land.  We 
> would go from an importer of oil to an importer of food.  In ethanol 
> calculations, they are using best case but the corn diverted to ethanol is 
> the marginal corn, corn grown with the most expensive inputs.

And I'm wondering if that doesn't come out to 71% of the cropland WITHOUT 
deducting the natural gas and petroleum it takes to grow the crops.

Someone recently showed the figures, and I can't find a flaw in them, that if 
only the state of Iowa tried to be self-sufficient in motor fuel by diverting 
all the corn grown there (which is a lot) to supply it's own population 
(which isn't a lot), just the state of Iowa would only be 87% self sufficient 
in 
motor fuel.

The rub comes in that although you can produce a lot of liquid fuel from 
corn, it takes as much as 93% of it to supply the energy to grow it and 
process it 
to begin with.  This pulls all the foodstuff from the food supply and also 
draws down the carbon sink in agricultural land and puts it directly into the 
atmosphere as CO2.

Less energy use is in our future no matter how own slices it.