4mo ago

Global land use for agriculture across different diets

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field corn is also used in ethanol production, and the stalks and cobs become fodder, which, yes, is also feed, but it's a highly efficient use of the plant and land, given the outputs.
- Sure, but you could also grow food corn, so it's not really a flaw in this graph.
  
  I don't think you could grow sweet corn at the same volume/efficiency. if you could, why wouldn't you? it's more valuable per pound
  
  Now, I'm not actually a farmer, but I suspect you're right. You can sell field corn, probably for a similar amount per hectare as food corn, because people will turn around and pay a much higher amount for animal products derived therefrom.
  In the scenario presented here that's basically wished away. The amount of ethanol we use compared to feed has got to be small, so I'm guessing that's how it all works.
  If we all switched to biogas that wouldn't be true, but electric has won the green power race decisively.
  
  Gasoline is 10% ethanol. E88 is 15% ethanol. The EIA estimates that we use 376 million gallons of gasoline per day in the USA. That's 37 million gallons of ethanol, minimum, per day.
  I'm going to paste from a comment I made the other day:
  There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it's a good, topical post worth perusal.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/
  
  Hmm. I forgot about the admixture into fossil fuels, good point. It makes me wonder if there really is no good alternate use for the byproducts, other than animal feed. Biodiesel is one possibility, although I'd have to research the economics of it at this point in technological development.
  The top reply there is "it's mixed", which is fair. Some places you have farmers growing alfalfa on good food land, which I personally see. Other places you have livestock grazing on semidesert - there really is no obvious alternate use there, until we run short on actual desert to build solar in.

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