Comment by kiba
10 hours ago
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job
I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.
Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
>Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows
Why? We like beef. I don't want it to go away.
~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.
Which could be easily converted in one harvest to feed a nation if needed. That option is very valuable.
Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?
I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.
Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/03/environm...
https://ethanolrfa.org/media-and-news/category/news-releases...