Can the U.S. grow enough corn to meet the demand for food and ethanol?

Question

If Ethanol production begins, what do you think will happen to the price of corn and the animals which eat it? Im wondering if the U.S. has the capacity to increase the supply.

Tell me what u think Farmers and Economists! I wanna learn.

Answer 1

Ethanol from corn.  Dumb Idea.  Corn is a high nitrogen user.  Where does most of the nitrogen come from?  Natural Gas, combined with Nitrogen from the air.    A lot of corn uses other fertilizers, none which are cheap.

Answer 2

Why not suck all the fat off the overweight  population and use that to run their motors? I can contribute more than a few pounds.

Answer 3

ethanol will prove to be too costly to produce in the long run.

Answer 4

Yes it can but the costs will be dear if we continue in the direction we are now going. It is evident the prices will go up. Currently, one-fifth of the U.S. corn crop is diverted to more than 100 ethanol refineries. This increased demand boosts the price of corn to record levels. Soybean farmers who want to cash in on this, have started to grow corn instead of soybeans.  This has a ripple effect as soybean  prices also rise because of reduced soybean supplies.  Many proponents of ethanol are now reevaluating biofuels and their consequences.

For more information, you may want to refer to the link below for TIME magazine’s March 27, 2008 article, ‘The Clean Energy Scam –Hyped as an eco-friendly fuel, ethanol increases global warming, destroys forests and inflates food prices.’

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl...

Answer 5

no, a bag of plain old deer corn more than doubled since last season alone. in places where corn is produced in great quanities, say kansas, there are also ethanol refineries. those refineries are buying all the corn from that area, plus having to have more shipped in. this will raise the cost of planting corn, which will in turn make less people grow it. im not saying it will happen soon but eventually farmers are going to get out of the corn business. to plant my 4 arce stretch of 20 rows this year was outrageous. diesel, fertalizer, and seed was crazy high

Answer 6

yes

Answer 7

No. Cost of corn has already started to climb.

Making ethanol from corn is silly, very expensive, and futile.

Answer 8

The US is easily growing enough corn to meet the demand for food and Ethanol. Before Ethanol the US was using about 20% of it's corn for feed and food. The other 80% was being exported. Ethanol is estimated to take about 20% of the corn in the US. That will result in a smaller amount of exported corn, but not by the entire 20%, because the distiller's dried grain will still be used as part of the corn used for feed. So in a sense we will be exporting less corn and the trade off is that we will be importing less oil.

As what will happen to the prices, it has already happened. The price of corn has gone up and the price of meat animals that feed on corn has gone up with it. This is not all bad. America has been eating cheaper food than almost any else in the world. The farmers have been due better prices for their produce for years. And the prices we are paying for food goes mainly to processors and retailers, not the farmers. As for the rest of your question, the US has the ability to increase the supply of corn and has already done so. The down side is that it has increased corn acreage at the cost of acres of other crops, mainly soybeans. This decrease will also result in less soybeans being exported, again the pay off is decreased import of oil.

Ethanol is not the whole answer  to our needs of alternate fuel to oil, but it is a start. Ethanol from bio-mass that can be grown on land less favorable for grain crops will be a big step forward and it has started being done. Other sources need to be developed as well as the ability to drill for more of our own oil and build more refineries. As long as we are dependent on the prices of foreign oil the prices of everything we have to buy will rise with the price of oil (not corn).

Answer 9

the coming appocolypse will take care of the food production.

we can still eat each other if we do run out

Answer 10

The CBOT has seen the record high for prices of the various commodities all competing for their share of the market and too maintain the needed acreage must bid accordingly.  Entities outside of the ag production circle, hedge traders, tech traders, etc have entered into the picture by buying into these grain commodities and in part have helped to push up these values.  When the Feds have a media sensation indicating financial distress, these traders exit the market and the price falls the daily limits.  At this time it is merely for profit taking as they enter/exit the market.  If ethanol is deemed unprofitable or there is other market scares these fund traders will go elsewhere with their money and the corn/soyb/wheat markets will fall and fall hard.  The farmers will be left holding the bag of commodity prices pre-ethanol and still being charged record high prices for anhydrous, DAP, potash, seed, etc.  World oil prices are high at this time and have pulled up the price for ethanol, production costs; when/if the oil prices fall back to this pre-ethanol frenzy, we will then see ethanol markets and the farmers with serious cash flow problems and a much higher incidence of bankruptcies.  Dairy farmers are handling this well at this time with $20 cwt milk but this will cycle; hog farmers are teetering on the fenceline, too many hogs and 35 cent market prices, along with this $5 corn... it is only a matter of time as we will see any number of these smaller operations fold up.  

This economy is balancing on a shoe string and the question is how tight can it be pulled before it pops?

Answer 11

No.  Indeed, we are already seeing skyrocketing food prices arising from the diversion of corn to ethanol production rather than animal feed.  And, since it requires as much energy to make a gallon of ethanol as it yields, every bit of this effort is a complete waste.  Only when it becomes possible to make ethanol from cellulose will it be economically rational to make ethanol.

Answer 12

A quick look at the price of ethanol, wheat and corn on the world market should answer you question.

Answer 13

John h is right. The question is..can the US grow enough corn to meet the need for food and ethanol. Yes, we can. We grow more than enough. What will decrease is the amount of corn exported.

Answer 14

It's not "if" ethanol production begins, because it began a long time ago.  No, the US can't produce enough ethanol from corn to supply the entire US with something like E85.  Corn is already sky high and has hurt livestock production.  To make things worse, inflation has more than doubled the price of nitrogen from last year and as a result, intended corn plantings are expected to be down 7% from last year according to the latest USDA reports.  This is going to put more pressure on the corn supply and increase prices until it becomes too expensive to economically convert to ethanol.  The manager at the plant near me said $6 (bushel) corn was the breakeven point.  

Ethanol does NOT use more energy to produce than the ethanol produces.  That's a myth that's been around for years.  As far as added value, there's about 30 pounds of distillers grains left from the orginal 56 pound bushel as well as carbon dioxide, which is used for carbonating soft drinks and other uses.  In addition, most ethanol plants use natural gas or coal to run the plant, not oil, so that energy form doesn't impact motor fuel supplies.