Under the Influence of Ethanol

CRP--originally conceived not for the benefit of fish, wildlife or soil but simply to reduce surplus, government-subsidized corn--has restored two million acres of wetlands and adjacent buffers, produced 7.1 million acres of new native grasses, protected 170,000 miles of streams, restored 1.2 million acres of rare and declining wildlife habitat and saved 450 tons of soil (enough to fill 37.5 million dump trucks). What's more, CRP annually produces 15 million pheasants and 2.2 million ducks and sequesters 48 million tons of carbon dioxide. It is absurd to suggest we can't afford CRP. The increased soil productivity it has provided is worth $162 million a year, increased waterfowl hunting $122 million, increased wildlife viewing $629 million, and runoff reduction $392 million.

Thanks to CRP and other Farm Bill conservation programs, Iowa--the corn capital of the nation--is suddenly teeming with smallmouth bass and, in the state's northeast hill country, wild trout. Yes, wild trout. "Our trout fishery is one of the best kept secrets in the country," declares Rich Patterson, who directs the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids and serves on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. "When I first came here 28 years ago it was all put-and-take, guys tossing corn to stupid hatchery trout. I'm catching incredible wild trout in streams that were mucky in the 1980's. And there has been a tremendous turnaround on smallmouths. They're sight feeders, and with clearing water they're increasing like crazy."

Marion Conover, chief of fisheries for the Iowa Fish and Wildlife Division, confirms Patterson's assessment. "The smallmouths are a reflection of improved clarity in our streams because of buffer strips and best management practices funded through the Farm Bill's conservation title," he says. "We manage four stream segments as catch-and-release for smallmouth--on the upper Iowa, Cedar River, Middle Raccoon, and Maquoketa. These are higher-quality streams, but we've seen smallmouths improve in places like the Mississippi River, parts of the Des Moines River, and the Missouri River in the Sioux City area of all places. It's simply a function of less dirt in the water. But there's a concern among the whole environmental community about what bodes for the future, what our landscape is going to look like next year or five years from now."

The Iowa brookies are a national treasure, genetically distinct from Yankee brook trout, Appalachian brook trout and even fish from Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 1980 only one of the state's streams had native brook trout reproduction, and only four had brown trout reproduction. Today there are at least 23 with self-sustaining browns and six with self-sustaining native brookies. The division's northeast fisheries supervisor, Bill Kalishek, expects that by the time you read this, new survey results will have significantly increased these numbers. And if Farm Bill programs remain intact, streams where there is now only sporadic reproduction will become self-sustaining. The brookies are small, but the browns are huge in relation to the little spring creeks in which they abide. Kalishek reports that 15- to 20-inchers are not unusual, and he's seen them up to 28 inches. "The unglaciated terrain here in northeast Iowa is highly erodible," he told me. "So cropland is very eligible for CRP. That program has taken a lot of the most highly erodible land out of row-crop production and reduced the amount of sediment getting washed into the streams. Not only has the water quality improved, so has the substrate quality for spawning."

But America's ethanol orgy frightens Kalishek and his colleagues. "I've seen some of the results already," he says. "The bulldozers are out there on the little corners of cornfields that used to be brushy draws or old fence lines so farmers can grow more corn. A lot of our general-signup CRP enrollments--where whole, erodible fields were taken out of production--are expiring in the next two or three years. And I'm worried that with this increase in corn production we're going to take a big step backwards in water quality and stream habitat and in our trout populations."

Well, as we so frequently tell ourselves and are told by our federal government, we all have to make sacrifices for energy self-sufficiency. But the sacrifices fish-and-wildlife advocates and taxpayers are being asked to make for ethanol do not and cannot decrease our dependency on foreign oil. In fact, they do just the opposite. This is because it takes more energy in the form of fossil fuels to make corn-based ethanol than we get from it.

Some researchers dispute this, but almost without exception they are directly or indirectly funded by or otherwise allied to agribusiness or the USDA (a wholly owned subsidiary of agribusiness). The credible stats issue from independent researchers whose studies have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and who have no irons in the fire. Two of the more notable ones are Dr. Tad W. Patzek, a chemical engineer from the University of California at Berkeley, and Cornell University's Dr. David Pimentel.

Pimentel, author of 24 books and nearly 600 scientific papers and selected by the Department of Energy to chair two scientific panels on ethanol production, told me this: "Ethanol is a boondoggle. Optimistically, using Department of Energy numbers, it amounts to one percent of our petroleum use. Ethanol requires almost 40 percent more energy to produce than you get out of it; we're having to import oil to make this stuff. And, of course, the environmental impacts to water, air and soil are enormous. During the fermentation process, when yeast is working on the starches and sugars, large quantities of carbon dioxide are released. In fact, some plants collect it and sell it to beverage companies. So it's a double whammy for global warming--not only burning fossil fuel but carbon dioxide production."

Pimentel reports that ethanol, which yields only two-thirds the energy of gasoline, gets 45 times more federal subsidy per gallon than gasoline. "That's what's attracting all the flies," he says. All told, you and I are spending at least $3 per gallon on ethanol subsidies for a total of $6 billion per year. Without all this gravy train, Pimentel has calculated that the cost for 1.33 gallons of ethanol (the equivalent in energy yield to a gallon of gasoline) would be $7.12.

The subsidies aren't going to family farms but to bloated, effluent-spewing agribusiness giants that get hungrier and dirtier with each feeding. According to one estimate--by financial analyst James Bovard of the Cato Institute--every dollar in profits earned by the nation's largest ethanol producer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), costs taxpayers $30.