Policy Positions: Ethanol and Land Use
ETHANOL AND LAND USE
U.S. ethanol producers take great care to ensure that natural resources are used in a responsible and sustainable manner. The ethanol industry understands that meeting increased demand for renewable alternatives to petroleum-based fuels cannot come at the expense of ecological health and environmental quality.
Recently, the potential land use implications of increased demand for biofuels in the U.S. have been at the center of an intense public discourse. However, when placed in proper context, the facts demonstrate that expansion of the ethanol industry has not had a significant impact on land resources. Remarkable increases in agricultural productivity are allowing farmers to produce more feedstock per unit of land than at any time in the past.
As they have done for decades, ethanol producers will continue to seek improvements in production efficiency and embrace technologies and practices that lessen the environmental impacts of production.
U.S. ETHANOL PRODUCTION HAS NOT BEEN A MAJOR DRIVER OF AGRICULTURAL LAND USE
Using oversimplified logic and questionable assumptions, critics have suggested future growth in U.S. demand for biofuels like ethanol would cause significant direct and indirect conversion of land in the United States and abroad. However, land use change isn’t nearly that simple. Experts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory say global land use change has been “largely independent of crop markets.” Rather, they say, land use changes are “driven by interactions among cultural, technological, biophysical, political, economic, and demographic forces—not singular events.”
Historical trends appear to indicate that increased U.S. ethanol demand has not been a significant driver of land use change. Increased crop productivity per unit of land has provided the growth in agricultural production necessary to meet heightened demand. It seems likely that small amounts of previously cultivated land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program may return to production, but more pronounced gains in productivity promise to mitigate the need for large amounts of new agricultural lands in the future.
Though U.S. ethanol production is expected to increase substantially in the years ahead, the total amount of agricultural land needed to support the U.S. ethanol industry will continue to be immaterial in the context of global agricultural land use. According to analysis by Air Resources, Inc., “... 15 [billion gallons per year] of corn ethanol production in 2015/16 should not result in new forest or grassland conversion in the U.S. or abroad.”
INCREASED CROP PRODUCTIVITY RELIEVES PRESSURE ON LAND RESOURCES
Heightened demand for crops in the last several decades has been met primarily through increased productivity per unit of land. Higher crop yields relieve pressure on land resources and mitigate the need to expand agricultural land use. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, yield increases are responsible for about 78% of global crop production growth between 1961 and 1999, with about 7% from more intense agriculture practices, and just 15% coming from agricultural area expansion. The role of higher yields in increased U.S. crop production is even more pronounced, as U.S. agricultural land use has actually decreased in the last several decades. As the chart below demonstrates, since 1980 American farmers have been able to produce twice as much on just 3% more acres due to dramatic increases in yields per acre.
Average corn yields have advanced rapidly in the United States. Improved management practices and seed technology advances are responsible for the dramatic increases in corn yields over the past four decades. During the decade of the 1970s, corn yields averaged 90.1 bushels per acre. The average yield in the 1980s was 106.7 bushels per acre, while the average yield in the 1990s was 123.8. From 2000 to 2007, yields have averaged 144.8 bushels per acre. As demonstrated by the reduction in deviations from the long-term trend, improved corn genetics have also helped mitigate yield shortages due to weather shocks.
DEFORESTATION
As American agricultural productivity is increasing and ethanol production rising, deforestation rates have been falling. Analysis of satellite imagery by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research indicates that deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have fallen to their lowest levels since the government began keeping data in 1988. Deforestation rates are down 14% year over year while U.S. ethanol production rose more than 20% over the same period. Importantly, most if not all deforestation occurs as a direct result of illegal logging, cattle ranching, and subsistence farming – not U.S. ethanol production.
LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD
All fuels should be treated equally when land use change is considered. For example, little consideration is given to emissions resulting from the extraction of oil from tar sands. Environmental Defense Canada estimates this technique releases 300% more greenhouse gases than traditional petroleum development, including the destruction of Canada’s boreal forests.
Likewise, other fuel technologies that may derive their power source from electricity produced from coal and other fossil fuels, for example, all have indirect impacts that are not counted in the same way perceived land use changes are attributable to biofuels.
FEED CO-PRODUCTS FROM ETHANOL PRODUCTION HELP MITIGATE IMPACTS ON LAND USE
The feed coproducts generated by ethanol biorefineries play an important role in mitigating impacts on land use change. Each 56-pound bushel of corn that is processed by an ethanol biorefinery results in not only 2.8 gallon of renewable fuel, but also 17 pounds of residual feed grains (commonly referred to as distillers grains, corn gluten feed, and corn gluten meal). Approximately 32.5 million metric tons of livestock feed were produced in 2009/10, an amount of feed equivalent to the total amount of grain fed to cattle in the nation’s feedlots.
Ethanol production uses only the starch portion of the corn kernel, while the remaining protein, fat, and other nutrients, vitamins and minerals are passed through the process into the distillers grains. Accordingly, only 2/3 of every acre of grain “dedicated” to ethanol production is actually used for biofuel production. The remaining 1/3 of the acre is more accurately characterized as producing livestock feed.
