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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

I mean this is the whole point of the US ethanol industry and farm subsidies in general(that many people complain about online), better to have people growing too much corn than not having enough. If the US did have some drought or disaster that damaged a huge amount of crops, we just stop making ethanol and use the stockpiles and reduced crop to feed ourselves. In the meantime we use the excess for ethanol production, even if it's technically a net loss

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The whole point of the US ethanol industry and farm subsidies in general is, like any form of government welfare, to give money to a special interest group (farmers) in exchange for their political support. It's not some kind of benevolent 4-dimensional chess to make the food supply more reliable. The type of corn grown for ethanol is not suitable for human consumption.

It's not 4-dimensional chess, it is simple strategy and two things can be true at the same time. The same applies to the defense industry's bloat -- keeping defense contractors capable to meet war time demand and eating up that cost now so it won't take 10 years to rebuild later on. At the same time, politicians make job programs out of these things to get reelected but these are "swing vote" politicians, every other politician would have to vote based on policy so that a nyc congressperson doesn't have to answer to voting for farm subsidies and military waste without some justification (even if his vote is in exchange for support for somee other vote).

the sub 1% of the population that are farmers in states that aren't battle ground states during election so they effectively don't matter? Not subsidizing farming is how you end up not being able to get critical goods during emergencies like Covid, you'll notice while there were toilet paper shortages, there wasn't a food shortage in the US.

the type of corn grown can be converted into other forms of calories like corn syrup that get used everywhere and are also used to feed livestock. Farm subsidies came about after the Dust Bowl so a single bad harvest doesn't ruin an otherwise capable farming operation

What changes would you recommend making so that the food supply could be secured without subsidies?

Is it still farmers? seems like more and more farmland is being bought up by corporations that manage many farms, at least in NZ.

Aren't ethanol, animal feed, and human food corn all separate, non-interchangeable species? Usually ethanol stuff and animal feed stock are completely inedible, at least in my EU country.

Yes, but the farm equipment that plants and harvests it is the same. Planting different seeds is easy, buying new equipment is not.

Also, as the transportation sector transitions to electric vehicles the demand for corn ethanol should drop off so if we need to produce more edible corn there should be excess capacity available.

I'm not sure how that works with corn, but quite a few things that aren't fit for human consumption in times of plenty are quite edible in a famine, or can be made so.

I don't think it's that but that most human digestive systems will catastrophically fail trying to digest ethanol-corn or animal feed-corn.

You can eat field corn just fine. You shouldn't eat it raw at maturity because of the high starch content, but the solution to that is simply to harvest a bit earlier before all the starch is formed. It's not very sweet, but it's perfectly edible.

There are two primary types of corn: field corn and sweet corn. Only sweet corn can be eaten raw or lightly cooked, but field corn can be turned into edible products (e.g. cereal) with some standard processing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

might be separate, non-interchangeable species (I don't know) but they require the same farmers, equipment, logistics, etc, to be in place and as everyone learned the last few years those things don't just scale up and down like latest cloud tech here.

That's mostly inedible for direct consumption, like corn on the cob. Processing into something like cornmeal though is open to much more species, including the original maize that all corn was essentially bred from.

The land is interchangeable, and 'human food corn' encompasses a lot more than just corn eaten directly by humans. Almost every processed food in the US uses some corn derived product; and animal feed is still part of the supply chain for human food.

>> this is the whole point of the US ethanol industry and farm subsidies in general

Interesting. I never saw it as a food security program.

I saw it as a way to advantage corn at the expense of oil on the global commodities market because we had lots of corn but we were short oil (at the time). So the solution was to, in effect, turn our corn into oil.

You can see its effect in the price of corn in 2006, which jumped about 80% and never went back down.[1]

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-char...

If the disaster that damaged the crops was “we used up all the soil” I’m not so sure this would work as a strategy. Is using up all the soil by growing ethanol a concern?

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