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North Central US | So one bored night of watching cows not calf, yet, has sent me down the RFS rabbit hole.
First thing of note I will ask you about is why push for E15 if there is a cap on conventional/traditional ethanol? I didn't know there was a government cap on grain ethanol until today, why not just pull the cap? What good would selling more ethanol do if you can't sell more grain ethanol? The summary for congress states this 15 billion gallon cap, the EPA, EIA, and the DOE all state it as well. 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel needed, only 15 billion is allowed to be traditional grain ethanol, the rest has to be "biomass" and whatnot. Why? Government mandated diversity?
Second is this graph I made, the information is from the USDA NASS and the corn prices are from them as well for the state of Iowa, prices received, as Iowa seemed to be a good long term place to get prices from since they have been known for corn forever and the UNI is apparently the only ones to compile 100 years of USDA reports into a nice PDF and I wasn't going to do that so I used theirs.
Left axis is US acres planted(of corn), right is the yearly average price received by NASS standards in Iowa, and the bottom is the year. Be careful when following the lines across the graph as excel has been "improved" by AI garbage who can't make a line graph so the slightly darker lines for price I added to hopefully aid that.
Anyways, the graph was machine made from NASS's and UNI's spreadsheets, with me adding events of note, world events, farm economy related events, and the various RFS events.
Its interesting to see more corn acres in the depression and it went up during it.
World War 2 didn't really phase it much, nor did Korea. Its interesting to see prices flat during Vietnam and only start to spike before the opec embargo then go down during it.
Jimmy Carter's Embargo didn't seem to hurt it.
Allis Chalmers and International Harvesters actions during the 80s appears to make short term sense, Deere perpetually laying off people the entire time didn't but long term apparently it did.
The EPA of 2005 appears to have given the price and acres a slight boost before losing what it gained.
The first mandate, 4 billion gallons, appears to be the "boom", raising acres and prices. The EISA of 2007 also appears to help keep prices up, while acres fall slightly.
2008 brings the panic and price crash.
10-13 sees another price and acres spike
Then the interesting thing: the cap on conventional ethanol is met in 2015, when it wasn't predicted and mandated by the government to hit it until 2022. That appears to coincide with the fall in prices shortly before it and after it. No more bottomless pit called the ethanol plant and the plants probably figured out how much they needed in the new post cap world.
Overall prices and acres basically stay where they are at until covid when both start to climb in apparent anticipation of the EPA being allowed to make their own allotments on all ethanol types(set 1), only for it to be delayed a year and a half, having prices fall then really fall when they announce that the cap of 15 billion gallons of traditional ethanol is staying.
23-25 I recall people stating here they were planting more corn because beans weren't worth it.
My prediction is if the cap is raised and e15 is mandated you will see the exact same RFS 1 to RFS 2 spike.
Notice how corn was overall trending down and had to a degree stabilized until the RFS 1 mandate when acres spiked and overall stayed up.
I have also included a Purdue graph of historical yields. The article it is from stated in the 70s to 2000s many predicted 300 BPA possible yields by 2030. Nationally I can see 200, but wasn't 300 already beat by a couple people?
With genetics allowing growing yields every year, and allowing corn to be successfully grown on ground previously thought to be unfit, prices will not stay up and acres will climb. There isn't a way to keep prices up and acres down or both up. You could mandate e100 and you'd see the same spike, a bigger spike but genetics and markets would push the price back down again.
Its my thoughts, looking back at easily accessible data. Argue away.
 (Corn acres and price graph (full).jpg)
 (20260401_065251 (full).jpg)
Attachments
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 Corn acres and price graph (full).jpg (58KB - 7 downloads)
20260401_065251 (full).jpg (49KB - 1 downloads)
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