Look, I hate to keep piddling on the parade of all y’all malthusians out there, but here’s another factoid to throw on this “food vs. fuel” debate.
About 100 years ago, about 50% of all farmland planted in the US was for fuel. Fuel for draft horses. As timothy hay. Horses were used in ag production for everything from tilling the land to pumping water. Where do you think the term of “horsepower” comes from? It wasn’t just a wild idea of an engineer to say “I think we’ll call a unit of 550 ft-lbs/sec a ‘horsepower’ just because it sounds cool.”
And not just fuel for horses. Cattle, hogs, sheep, rabbits and chickens also need fuel.
I doubt that that 50% has dropped much in recent years.
Using corn for fuel makes corn liquor, that's how NASCAR started.
In Brazil they are using sugar cane- that's Rum.