If ethanol was such a great idea one would have thought the growers would have made an attempt to convert to its usage in the machinery used in the production.
The idea of using 95% ethanol as motor fuel was advanced by Henry Ford, in the early days of internal combustion engines, and given the technology of the time, may have made good economic sense. The ethanol-producing crops could be grown right on the very farms where it was consumed, restoring the idea of subsistence farming to where it was with horses, where the hay and grain production was diverted partly to support the necessary teams of horses needed to till and harvest. Off-farm sales made up only a relatively small part of the annual production of smaller farms, and farmers rarely had much in the sway of cash.
As it became to be, petroleum products had to be purchased by the farming enterprise to use in the internal-combustion engines that became the norm for power to till the soil and harvest the crops. While it made the productivity of the individual farming enterprise much greater, there was also woven an interdependence that would be hard to separate today.