Food or Fuel? Biofuels Inefficient, Study Suggests An exhaustive
study of 17 years’ worth of data on the use of productive
farmland came to the following conclusion, according to one of
the Michigan State University researchers: “It’s 36 percent more
efficient to grow grain for food than for fuel… The ideal is to
grow corn for food, then leave half the leftover stalks and
leaves on the field for soil conservation and produce cellulosic
ethanol with the other half.” Given the large amount of noise
around Washington about biofuels, much of which emanates from
the direction of the corn lobby, these results are highly
pertinent. In today’s issue of Environmental Science and
Technology (subscription required), the researchers published
their findings based on 1989 to 2007 energy balance data from
the W.K. Kellogg Long Term Ecological Research site in northeast
Michigan. They looked at wheat, soybeans, and corn rotations
under four management systems: conventional tillage, no-till,
low chemical input and organic. T