Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Agriculture, energy more closely linked
http://it.moldova.org/stiri/eng/97659/

U.S. scientists said the recent boom in ethanol production from corn has
tightly linked the agriculture and energy sectors in unprecedented fashion.

We are living through a revolution in American agriculture, said Purdue
University Professor Wally Tyner, who noted the prices of corn and crude
oil, which prior to 2007 fluctuated nearly independently, have become more
closely linked due to the use of massive quantities of corn to make
ethanol.

Tyner said one of the most dramatic aspects of the ethanol revolution is a
ballooning percentage of corn crops being made into ethanol, which prior to
2004 had been lower than 10 percent. Now, for the first time, ethanol has
replaced exports to become the second largest use of the grain behind that
of domestic animal feed, Tyner said.

Tyner's paper, co-written by Purdue researcher Farzad Taheripour, was
presented last week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.

The paper -- available at http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/papers/ -- is to be
published in the Review of Agricultural Economics.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International

Publication date: 21 February 2008   

Source: UPI-1-20080221-13090200-bc-us-ethanol.xml