In article ,
Duane Bozarth wrote:
Morris Dovey wrote:
....
We can expect that as the cost of fuel rises, more and more land will
be given over to ethanol production - and other crops will be
sacrificed until a (shifting) economic balance is achieved. Soybean
derivatives (everything from livestock feed to plastics) will become
sharply more expensive.

If the pressures to maximize ethanol production are sufficiently high,
we face the danger of taking a giant step backward to repetitively
planting the same crop on the same land until the soil is exhausted.
Should we get to that point, there will be serious breakage - and the
worst of it won't be in the corn belt.

I think you overestimate this scenario extensively...for one thing, at
present there are millions of acres of formerly-producing crop ground in
the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that could, IF (that's the "big
if" ) it were necessary and economical, be brought back into
production for many of these ancillary crops as well as corn and
concerned w/ maintaining productivity of the land, it is we
soybeans.

Pulling land out of CRP is a *short*term* only 'fix'. *SMART* farm
production involves carefully designed rotation of crops planted on a
given plot *AND* the cycling of that land _out_of_production_use_ as a
regular element in that rotation. *MOST* CRP acres are land that would
be 'idled' even if CRP didn't exist.

You get more acres in production, *BUT*, over time (meaning 5 years, or
*less*), due to degraded land quality from continuous use, yield/acre goes
_down_. The effective increase in production is nowhere close to the
increased acreage.