Renewable is Not a Synonym for Sustainable

Keep reciting it to yourself... Renewable is not a synonym for sustainable

One of my dad's maxims was "never buy or sell hay." Buying hay might bring in the seeds of weeds we had spent years trying to control; selling hay removed tons of nutrients without replacing it with commensurate manure.Thousands of years of unharvested prairie had built the rich silt loam. The first 75 years of diversified, value-added farming saw mainly livestock and livestock products leave a nearly-level farm, using no commercial fertilizer, yet with ever-increasing yields.

We began raising soybeans during World War II, rotating and covering about one-fifth of the acreage each year. By 1954, soil tests showed a need for phosphate fertilizer. (The southwest Iowa soils were high in potassium and we inoculated the beans for nitrogen fixation.)

A farmer may be able to sell some switchgrass grown from the nutrients in the soil, but over time will have to replace a lot of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and eventually some micro-nutrients.

Maintenance rates would cost around $30, at 2007 prices, per ton of dried switchgrass sold. For biofuels to be sustainable, fertilizer sources would have to be limitless and economical.

Some in the biofuels industry say farmers will need a $50-per-ton subsidy to make switchgrass work for them.

Letter to the Editor of the Des Moines Register from Dale Shires of Iowa City.

The Ethanol Bubble -- prices to $4.50 per bushel in February, I think we can begin to call it a Bubble -- is on the rise. Even at the $3.70 or so price of last week, farmers willl sorely tempted to plant every last acre in corn. Never mind the fences or the marginal land, or the "green strips" or the CRP fields.

America and America's farmers seem perfectly willing to sacrifice the last few inches of world-class topsoil in order to extend the Age of Easy Motoring just a couple more years.

Also, check out The Exchange, (MP3 file) from Iowa Public Radio last week as Dennis Keeney, Senior Fellow at Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, cautions against irrational exuberance in renewables.

We need a sustainable, future-proof energy policy. Renewables and ethanol (from whatever source) are just a small part of the eventual solution.

How's that $3.00 a gallon gas treating you?

Drive less.