southern MN | BryceH - 9/11/2024 21:14
Hello all,
I'm sure this will go over well, but an interesting thought was mentioned to me today and I wasn't sure how to respond so I'm sharing it.
One of the things I generally don't like about solar is giving up crop ground and more importantly it just looks terrible IMO. However, it was pointed out to me that roughly 40-50% of corn grown in the county currently goes to ethanol production. So the question asked was what is the difference between using land to power cars with ethanol vs using land to make electricity so people can drive electric cars?
Ethanol takes the starch out of the feed stream converting it to sugar and ethanol. The rest of the grain goes on to feed high protein feedstock - a fair amount of the grain is still used for food production. Solar panels pretty much take the land out of ag production period.
If for some reason we go hungry, we can flex the corn into more feed/ food and less ethanol. A very flexible redundant system. We can cover food and fuel, moving excess production or crop shortages between the two to cover both bases. Seems like a bonus setup to me? Corn production split between food and fuel makes both more stable, more easily covering any shortage.
To add to that, we can always use the farm land to grow feed or food if we don’t need ethanol.
Solar panels put gravel, concrete, posts, compaction, and so on to the land, it is basically done for ever growing a feed or food crop ever again. At the least it would take great expense and time in years to reclaim a solar farm into crop land agsin.
Pretty clear difference there.
Paul |
Solar vs corn
