Eric Rund responded to Grunwald's article that appeared in Time Magazine on March 27

His full response is printed here

This past January I led a group of fellow farmers to Brazil to learn about its very successful renewable energy programs. Like Michael Grunwald, we visited Governor Maggi and John Carter. We also visited the independent sugar cane growers association, General Motors, the Port Authority in Santos, the Ministry of Mining and Energy in Brasilia, a soybean processing plant, and many Brazilian farmers. The trip was very enlightening.

I applaud TIME for sending someone to see first hand what is happening with deforestation in Brazil. However, Grunwald’s story would have been more objective had Timothy Searchinger not been traveling with him. As it turns out, Grunwald’s piece basically echoes Searchinger's article which appeared recently in Science. In that paper, Searchinger suggests that growing biofuel crops in the US causes an increased demand for cropland to produce food elsewhere, resulting in more deforestation in Brazil.

While biofuel may have some effect on the demand for new cropland, it is certainly not the only factor. The world population is growing, and as incomes improve people are demanding more meat, eggs and milk in their diet; things that require more grain. Young Brazilian farmers wanting a farm of their own, can only afford the forested lands. There are also those who want to sell their land, and it is worth more if it is cleared. Some of the biggest critics of how Brazil uses its land live in the United States, where we loose two acres of mostly prime farmland every minute to housing, shopping malls and highways. That is over a million acres and approximately equal to 70% of the annual deforestation in Brazil.

A vast nation, Brazil is about the size of the United States, only without all the mountains and deserts where we can’t grow crops. To put it in perspective, our entire crop of soybeans in the United States, 80 million or so acres, could easily be grown in the unused portion of the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil, without having to clear a single acre of rainforest. The nation is huge. Governor Maggi understands this. His comment to us was that fuel or food is not an issue,  there is enough cropland for both, plus enough left over for large reserves of undisturbed native lands.

Knowing that all this land is available can be a temptation to use it unwisely. That is why the work that people like John Carter are doing is so important. We must find ways for farms to coexist within the natural areas. If we don’t and too many trees disappear, there is evidence to show that rainfall amounts will diminish and overall crop production in Brazil could suffer.

Searchinger argues that more GHG (green house gas) is released from felled trees than is saved by the production of ethanol from corn or even switch grass. But Brazil uses a tremendous amount of firewood. In fact, virtually all of the 61 million tons of soybeans produced in Brazil are dried and processed using firewood. Much of this firewood comes from the very land being cleared for farmland.  Small industries and charcoal making also keep tremendous amounts of felled trees from going to waste. The point is, Brazil is using the firewood from cleared land in ways that replace the use of fossil fuels, and therefore, is not adding to GHG in the way Searchinger’s formula suggests.  Of course, not all cleared trees are used for firewood.  But then, not all trees are cleared to replace bean acres displaced by more corn acres, which is what Searchinger suggests.

Grunwald leaves one with the impression that America is blundering forward producing more and more corn ethanol with no thought of the consequences. He points out that our new Energy Bill calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel. What he fails to mention is that the NCGA (National Corn Growers Association) wisely recommended that 21 of the required 36 billion gallons come from something other than grains. Something I call Level II feedstocks, defined as biomass materials that under normal circumstances are not used for human or animal consumption. The NCGA knows that our biggest market and most important use for corn is animal feed, and if we are to keep meat production from going overseas, then we need to provide reasonably priced feed to our livestock producers here.

Searchinger and Grunwald put biofuel into two broad categories: one for grains and one for cellulose (straw, grass, wood, leaves, etc). At one point this simple approach was acceptable, but the surge in spending on renewable fuels research is beginning to pay off with new and diverse solutions. Besides improvements in the efficiency of sugar cane and corn ethanol production, there are many other crops and processes under development which can dramatically improve the yields and lower the inputs needed to grow and process bioenergy. Where they make sense farmers will learn to grow these crops and incorporate them into their operations.

                                         Liters of Ethanol

     Crop                            or Biodiesel/Ha                            Plus

Sugar Cane                              4540*              Power to run the process and electricity to sell  

Corn                                         4680               3.9 Metric Tons of DDG’s for animal feed

Soybeans (biodiesel)                 700                low yield, 2.7 Metric Tons of soy meal, for feed

Rapeseed (biodiesel)               1600                a cool weather oil seed crop popular in Europe

Jatropa (biodiesel)                   2570                grows on poor soils, it grows wild in Haiti

Oil palm (biodiesel)                12000                very productive oil crop, hard to mechanize

Switchgrass                             6080                cellulosic, low yield, native to North America

Miscanthus Gigantus              14040                cellulosic, high yield, low inputs

Arundo Donax                         38000                cellulosic, very high yield, high phosphorus use

*This accounts for 20% of the land in sugar cane production being reseeded every year.

Corn ethanol has its shortcomings, but calling it a “scam” is a little over the top. It also ignores history. Corn ethanol gained prominence when it became the only practical replacement for the cancer causing gasoline additive MTBE. The effect on farming was phenomenal. The increased use for corn caused prices to rise to the point that farmers made money for the first time in a long time without commodity price subsidies.

Early biofuel technologies are merely stepping stones.  We will get to more efficient solutions, but not if we throw out the entire pursuit merely because initial ventures weren’t as successful as we’d hoped.  We should not let the “irrational exuberance” we felt for ethanol two years ago be replaced by an “enthusiastic pessimism.” The answer lies somewhere in between.

Eric Rund

Farmer - Pesotum, Illinois