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very well be in transition toward an inevitable concentration of ownership into the hands of a few large processing firms." The market is driven by large-scale gasoline refining firms, which "don't want to deal with all these small plants," and a "virtual consolidation of ethanol processing" is taking place. (ADM didn't respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
New biorefinery developments are trending away from farmer ownership. In 1999, farmers owned all new plants being constructed, but by 2006 "they owned just 19% of the 1.7 billion gallons that will flow from 29 new plants going up or expanding," according to Successful Farming magazine.
"You have some of the same players as in the food sector, Cargill and ADM, whose interest is in buying low and selling high," points out George Boody, executive director of the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project, who wants to ensure that biofuels are grown sustainably. "Massive production of a few crops is the best way to get there, and that typically doesn't bode well for small to mid-sized farmers because the margins get too tight and the acreage requirements grow and grow."
Farming expert and author Marty Strange, a onetime director of the Center for Rural Affairs, says ethanol's growth, like the rest of agricultural industrialization, brings little hope for smaller producers. "There's no question that large-scale ethanol production depends on large-scale grain production. The small-scale diversified grain farmer is not what the ethanol industry relies on."
Another dilemma: By edging out diversified farming, large-scale corn mono-cropping could weaken local food security, requiring more long-distance transport of foods (already averaging roughly 1,800 miles per item) -- thus more diesel pollution from the trucks that haul foodstuffs. Meanwhile, EPA efforts to repair the Gulf of Mexico's 10,000-square-mile hypoxic zone, a massive oxygen-killing algae bloom created in good part by runoff from fertilizers and pesticides applied to corn and other grain crops, may call for less corn -- not more. Likewise, some advocates emphasize the need for more localized ethanol (and biodiesel) production, to support farmers and avoid the ironies of cross-country shipping of renewable fuels.
These economic and ecological tensions are generating increased collaboration between sustainable farming and clean-energy advocates. Jim Kleinschmit, rural communities program director for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, cites a growing concern that biofuels "be produced in a way that's sustainable for the landscape, for the farmer's pocketbook, and for the community." Patrick Mazza and others say that ethanol and other biomass energy can be produced in a way that sustains farmers and the environment, if policy incentives are designed to promote both.
An array of ideas are afloat to encourage a more sustainable biofuels expansion: a diversified renewable energy policy that, rather than expanding corn crops, promotes more wind power and cellulosic energy from switchgrass and crop residues (which may favor localized, small-scale production); a federal version of Minnesota's model, creating targeted incentives for farmer co-ops; and increased research spending by the USDA and Department of Energy to develop smaller-scale biofuels processing plants. Negotiations for the 2007 federal farm bill, already simmering, will feature a battle between agribusiness' push for monocropping of cheap commodities, and family farm groups' efforts to raise crop prices and rein in corporate control.
Iowa corn and soybean farmer George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition, warns that without proper supports, intense pressures for cheap energy will further imperil farmers' frayed pocketbooks. "It's an absolute must that there be public policy to make sure that the environment is taken into account, how land is being used, and whether family farmers benefit at all from it." Such policy, says Naylor, must incorporate the intertwined concerns of small farmers, sustainable agriculture, and clean energy -- "so it isn't just a matter of everyone going out and plowing the hell out of the countryside thinking there's going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
Christopher D. Cook's writings have appeared in Harper's, The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. He is the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595580840/commondreams-20/ref=nosim> (New Press).
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