The thousands of farmers who feed those distillers grains know it, and depend on it for feed for hundreds of thousands of cattle. If you eat beef it's an almost certainty that the beef was produced suing distillers grains..
Out of three semi loads of corn going into an ethanol plant, roughly two come out as livestock feed, one as ethanol.
I can send you links to various university trials supporting the above rough calcs.
Not that ethanol subsidies shouldn't end, I think they should, it's just that a lot on nonsense gets tossed around regarding the efficiency of corn to ethanol.
From the standpoint of availability of food resources, would it not make more sense to use everything in the corn as foodstuff? Or does the ethanol come from only the part of the corn the cattle would turn into methane, without any advantage to the cattle?
Also, from the standpoint of feeding people, when there is not enough to go around, production of beef is an inefficent way to provide foodstuffs. (Ok, ok, I like a good burger or steak too...)
There’s one more difference that never gets mentioned. Sweet corn, the kind I eat, is much more valuable as cob or kernel table corn than field corn, the kind that gets fed to cows or to distilleries. No corn farmer in his right mind is going to ship sweet corn to an ethanol plant unless maybe he grew a bad crop. But there’s a limit to how much corn people can eat. The case cannot be made that sweet corn has been taken out of production to feed either cows or ethanol plants——other grains, such as soft wheat maybe but not sweet corn. If subsidies are allowing field corn to push out food grains then the numbers have gotten out of balance and the subsidies need to wind down. High priced crude oil back in the 1973 oil embargo pushed gasoline very close to the production cost of ethanol/methanol and that’s when the Saudis folded their tent——I wrote about this then and nothing has changed but the numbers.
Thanks for clearing that up. I didn’t have reason to doubt that, but I didn’t want to take some caller on the radio’s story as gospel. So, now I’ll take an anonymous forum poster instead. :) But it’s corroboration and I can look it up if I need to later for some reason. Thanks.