Symposium Offered Plenty of Food for Thought

By Joan Sanstadt News Editor
Thursday, November 27, 2008 8:44 PM CST

Energy, food and climate were the topics of a Nov. 12 afternoon symposium at the Ebling Symposium Center on the UW-Madison campus.

The symposium, sponsored by the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP), UW-CALS, the Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative (WBI) and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Theme of the conference was “Keeping Things in Balance: A Closer Look at the Issues, Trade-offs and Opportunities in Agriculture Policy.”

After introductory remarks by DATCP Secretary Rod Nilsestuen and Irwin Goldman, UW-CALS, Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, took over his role as moderator of the symposium.

The first speaker was Randy Fortenberry, who holds the RENK chair in agribusiness, agricultural and applied economics and is the director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at UW-Madison.

Fortenberry led off the program with a discussion of “where we are in biofuels production and how that relates to food.”

Something often missed in the discussion is the recognition that electricity is needed to keep foods safe. In Bangladesh, a country about the size of Wisconsin but with 150 million people, there is a lack of electrical energy to keep fool cool or frozen.

“It’s not fuel versus food (as in the discussion of whether corn should be used as fuel or food),” Fortenberry said. “It’s that electricity is needed to store, process and deliver food. The United Nations has suggested that by 2050 we will need to double the world food production to meet population needs. Food production is energy dependent,” he added.

Even if half of the corn grown in the United States was used in ethanol fuel, it would yield about 15 billion gallons of ethanol per year. Yet the United States uses about 390 million gallons of gasoline per day for transportation (about 11 percent of current consumption), Fortenberry continued.

He suggested “all the U.S. is doing with its ethanol and alternative fuel production is offsetting some of the growth of gasoline consumption.

Fortenberry said the rise in the price of corn isn’t just due to ethanol production, “but has a lot to do with volatility in the market. It’s that uncertainty that keeps people out of the market because it prevents them from planning. Volatility is as important as price levels.”

Also impacting the price of corn was the value of the dollar, which affects export market figures, Fortenberry added.

“When corn went from $8 per bushel down to $3.85, this did not reduce demand on corn for ethanol production; the price of ethanol fell by that same margin,” Fortenberry said.

“As speculation interest on markets went up, so did the prices of commodities, including corn and wheat. Ethanol did impact the price of corn n yes, but other things are also impacting the market. Ethanol prices do not increase by the price of corn; but by the price of gasoline,” Fortenberry said.

Fortenberry summed up his remarks this way: current research shows:

- corn and ethanol prices have a correlation of near zero;

- Ethanol prices are highly sensitive to gas prices; and

- Food prices are sensitive to energy prices.

“There is concern that land is being diverted from food to fuel production and that is the cause of increasing food prices,” Fortenberry said, but he believes it is also necessary to look at land use in other parts of the world.

The palm oil industry is moving into the Amazon rainforest and across the world land is being converted to produce oil products.

“We should be very concerned about deforestation in general,” Fortenberry said, adding “increased commodity production in the U.S. impacts land use in the rest of the world.”

There are other things that need to be considered when we compare costs. For instance, “Brazilian ships can move soybeans up the Amazon without having to be loaded or unloaded,” Fortenberry pointed out.

“Biofuels markets, long-term, are low in terms of the commodity market,” he continued. “What’s happened in the last one and one-half years has been unprecedented. If we eliminated the biofuels market tomorrow, we wouldn’t have solved the problem.

“We have to focus on sustainable food and fuels to meet global demands,” Fortenberry said, adding “the greatest costs, both social and economic, of food and bioenergy production systems will come from the environmental side.”

Other speakers

STEVE VENTURA, chair of the department of Soil Science at UW-Madison, noted “the more fragile the land, the greater of risk of environmental impact from ag and forest production. About half of the land in Wisconsin’s land mass is in forests.”

BRENT McCOWN, director, Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Center for Integrated Agriculture Systems at UW-Madison, presented an updated on biomass feedstocks.

“How much switchgrass for energy use can come from Wisconsin lands?” he asked.

This plant, which is really a prairie grass, grows in a bunch. It does best in areas where there are warm days and a lot of light.

“Switchgrass is native to the eastern half of the U.S. It grows in lowland and upland areas. From New Mexico to Nebraska it grows in wetland areas and there it is bigger and attains greater height. In upland areas, the stalk is shorter and there is less yield but it is more hardy,” McCown continued.

“Combining the two types of switchgrass offers the greatest opportunity,” McCown said.

There are other advantages to switchgrass. They include a deep root system which helps prevent erosion and it has some value to wildlife. It can also be grown with other corps and can be harvested using normal equipment.

“A disadvantage is that its seed and new seedlings are small and therefore they are susceptible to weed competition,” McCown said.

TERRY MACE, works for the DNR’s Division of Forestry where his specialty is woody biomass.

Consideration has to be given to issues such as “how much biomass can we take without affecting the viability of the land” and also to the high cost of getting underbrush out of forests.

“If we converted all the biomass in the state (into fuel) within six years we’d have used up all of our forests,” Mace said.

Two Wisconsin paper mills are involved in two research projects involving biomass, “but the cost of removal is a major limiting factor to its production,” he said.

CHRIS KUCHARIK, SAGE/Nelson Institute, talked about carbon sequestration opportunities in Wisconsin.

“When tall grass prairies were here, there were large stores of carbon in the soil. But a lot of the sod busting, beginning in 1850, led to the oxidation of that carbon which had been stored in the soil.

“The time window is shrinking,” Kucharik said, “when we can replace that carbon.”

Kucharik pointed to the recommendations for the ag sector that came out of the Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming. “That task force encouraged prairie grass plantings, it recommended improved soil management practices and also preserving the carbon sequestration that is taking place now on CRP land.

More information on carbon sequestration and the task force recommendations can be found by visiting: http://www.chicagoclimatechange.com.

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