Is Going Green The Right Thing To Do?

Using 15% ethanol fuel in NASCAR certainly appears to be the thing to do in this day and age. The initial thought being “Anything we can do to be proactive in the public’s eye concerning ending our country’s dependency on foreign oil.” And yes, up front, NASCAR has scored some points with the “Go Green” crowd, but is this really the right way to go? This line of reasoning can run in many directions and I don’t want to get too political here so I’ll look at one angle in particular. As many of you know, I was a farmer most of my life. Here are a couple of facts concerning America’s growing reliance on corn based ethanol as a fuel additive:

1. Growing a good corn crop takes lots of nutrients from the soil. Good farmers are concerned about the make-up of their soil. They want a soil that features a balanced range of elements, both of the macro variety like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, and of the micro variety like calcium, zinc, sulfur and so on and they know growing corn depletes their property’s soil of nutrients. For this reason, Midwest corn farmers have rotated crops from year to year to sustain the soil on their farms. They would grow the soil deleting corn one year and a legume crop such as soy beans the next since legumes actually add to the soil’s nutrients rather than depleting them. With the cost of foreign oil moving upward at an alarming rate due to political unrest in the Middle East, our country’s reliance on American ethanol is steadily rising. Estimates in 2007 pegged 30% of our nation’s corn crop to be used for ethanol five years later in 2012 while we are already surpassing 40% in 2011. Suddenly our farmers are feeling pressure to grow corn year after year on the same ground, and with a bullish corn market the temptation to neglect good farming practices has gone up.

2. So, by potentially being forced to grow corn year in and year out on the same piece of ground, farmers will now be faced with adding more fertilizer to maintain a vigorous corn planting that produces many bushels per acre. The problem here is that it takes around 125 pounds of nitrogen per acre to grow that vigorous corn crop and cost conscious farmers know the cost of nitrogen is significantly less when products such as Ammonium Nitrate or Urea are used instead of the mixed nutrient fertilizers that may be better for the soil. These cheaper (per pound of nitrogen) high nitrogen fertilizers contain nitrate nitrogen that is easily leached (moved by water and gravity) through the soil. This process can taint groundwater. Today we’re finding farmers in areas that have grown other types of crops, specifically the cotton growing region of the Mississippi River Valley, now growing corn to take advantage of the excellent price. Cotton, the crop traditionally grown in the south, has a much lower need for nitrogen fertilizer. Fertilizing corn in this region will result in large amounts of nitrate nitrogen being leached into the ground water. This could be a deadly combination for the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, the nitrate nitrogen will eventually find its way into the Gulf creating an anaerobic environment that will kill sea life. I wonder what the environmentalists will think of this… Problems with nitrate nitrogen tainted ground water already exist in California’s Horns of Plenty: the San Joaquin, Salinas and Imperial Valleys.

Beyond these concerns, the higher price of oil is now being felt in everyone’s costs for food. Have you thought how much of that is directly attributable to the higher corn price due to its use in ethanol production? Corn is used in so many of our foods, everything from cereal and sugar to meat prices come into play…

So I ask you, which is worse, limiting our use of foreign oil by continuing this new reliance on corn ethanol or finding other means of fueling our nation’s economy? It’s said that our country sits on some of the largest untapped oil and natural gas reserves in the world up in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming and yet the environmentalists fight every attempt to extract those resources in an effort to put an end to our use of fossil fuels when our most precious natural resource, fresh, clean water is being threatened.

And suddenly, here is NASCAR trying to shine their star in the eyes of the nation by using 15% ethanol…