The water use by ethanol plants looks impressive to city slickers who aren’t used to being around irrigated ag.
On our hay farm, growing alfalfa for cattle, we used up far more water than corn every would. Like at least three times as much in a 100 day growing season.
People crap kittens when they see numbers of “million gallons per day.” Pfah.
I had four pumps that would pump 1,000 gallons per minute (some more, some less, but aggregated, it came out to 4K gal/min). In a 24-hour day, our farm was pumping over 5 million gallons on 500 acres of irrigated ground.
Irrigated corn and water for ethanol processing is a drop in the bucket of overall ground water usage in the US.
Want to get your panties in a wad about something? Go look at how much water a damn golf course uses. It is absurdly more than any irrigated crop in the US, acre for acre.
Sad but true, and it's how the leftist environmentalists (communists) manage the ignorant slickers.
Just find a Snail Darter or a food chain Minnow and, bingo, the commies can pit the Salmon Sushi slickers and fishermen against the farmers and take away the water they have already contracted and paid for. Then, maybe, Ya can raise the price of electricity and they can't run their own pumps (assuming they're allowed to pump their own wells).
Same "environmentalists" that put MTBE into that same water supply as the "new improved" ethanol.
The real bad guys keep popping up as everyone's enemies.
Good farming needs a LOT of water, and it's the best place we can put it.
**Go look at how much water a damn golf course uses. It is absurdly more than any irrigated crop in the US, acre for acre.**
They have to be irrigated like crazy. Even here in the midwest, they ADD sand to the courses during construction so the ground will not get muddy and rutted when used after a heavy rain. But the sand helps it dry out and will cause the grass to wither without the irrigation.
The greens are given an occasional spreading of fine sand to hold down the thatch which makes the ball roll so nicely. But the extremely short grass gets cooked by the sun warming the sand.
And the pesticides per acre is absurdly higher on a golf course (Hey you golfers! Be sure to wash your hands after handling your golf shoes. Especially if you’re the nail biting sort).
The fertilizers are really laid on heavy for the thick (dense) greens and tees to survive and thrive while being mowed so short. Walk by a pile of plugs taken from an aerated green and take a whiff; the ammonia makes it smells as bad as any comparable pile of farm manure.
Most golf courses also employ many illegal immigrants (I used to deliver sand to over 100 courses. Many of their maintenence depts had a manager and an assitant that could speak english; the rest only spanish).
Ethanol...yeah it shouldn’t be subsidized. Neither should airlines, the ‘arts’, abortion (the BADDEST of all), etc.