The U.S. is growing more corn than it can handle via bopinion
1 / 5 -- This year’s U.S. corn crop isn’t looking great. Soggy spring weather in many parts of the Midwest delayed planting, and warmer-than-normal temperatures lately have been posing their own problems.
That acreage is higher than it was a few decades ago, which accounts for some of the production boom. But this acreage increase followed even bigger declines in the mid-20th century — grain-corn acreage hit its all-time high of 110.9 million in 1917. The main reason the U.S. produces much more corn than it used to is because U.S. corn farmers have become much, much more productive.
Story continuesIn wealthier countries the role of corn is more complicated. In China, most of it goes to animal feed. That used to be the case in the U.S., but for the market year that ended last month, the USDA estimates that 38% of U.S. grain corn went to making ethanol versus 37.3% into animal feed. Another 14.6% was exported, followed by 5.6% used in making the sweeteners high-fructose corn syrup, glucose and dextrose.
With President Donald Trump now complaining of spending way too much of his time trying to balance the interests of the oil industry, which wants a relaxation of biofuel standards, with those of Midwestern farmers who don’t, it seems pretty clear that the main continuing role of the biofuels mandate is to keep U.S. corn prices — which happen to have hit their all-time inflation-adjusted low in 2005 — from collapsing further.
Environmentally, there are positives to this as well as negatives. Agricultural productivity gains are surely one of the biggest reasons U.S. forests have stopped shrinking: After declining by an estimated 30% from 1630 to 1920, U.S. forested acreage has grown about 6% since 1920 even as the population has tripled. In theory, at least, rising corn yields here and elsewhere could also slow the conversion of tropical forests into farmland in Africa, Asia and South America.
This assessment is based not on any great stores of corn-farming knowledge but on following University of Illinois agricultural economist Scott Irwin on Twitter.
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