People are hearing the wrong stories about one of South Dakota's great industries

By Gordon Garnos

AT ISSUE: During this oil price crisis, one of South Dakota's leading industries, ethanol production, has somehow become its opponents' whipping boy. In just the past couple of months oil prices have shot to the moon and food prices have already left the launching pad. Through a major propaganda project, somehow, ethanol is being wrongly blamed for all of this inflation.

While ethanol may be a player in all of this, to put the entire blame on ethanol for those skyrocketing prices is as wrong as wrong can be.

A SCENARIO: When milk and other groceries arrive at the local store, they are generally delivered by truck. When gasoline arrives at the gas station for resale for your car, it is delivered by truck. When new clothing arrives at the haberdashery, it arrived by truck. When diesel fuel arrives at your farm, it, too, arrived by truck. At this point I think you know where I am going with this. Those trucks are not going to move a mile without something to feed them. And that is fuel, expensive fuel that may have come from across the world.

To pay for that increased price of fuel, the price of milk and other groceries have gone up. The gasoline at the pump has been increased, etc. I believe you get the picture. According to the Energy Information Administration, in the past year diesel fuel prices have increased 49 percent and gasoline prices have gone up over 18 percent.

Where does ethanol play in all of this? The renewable fuel standard, set by Congress, mandates the nation's oil companies blend at least 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol with their gasoline by 2015 and 21 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2022. Consequently, the oil refineries, food manufacturers and other groups feeling the sting of all this say, "Aha! It's ethanol's fault!" And we are being led to believe this drivel.

THERE HASN'T BEEN a propaganda machine greased so well since Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, went to work.

At the same time, as I have said, ethanol is not entirely blameless. One study points to ethanol as the culprit for $6 corn a bushel from $2 a bushel a couple of years ago. The study found that 31 percent of the total price increase was related to ethanol production. The rest of it, 69 percent was connected to several factors, such as the increased demand for food from developing countries, the devaluing of the American dollar on the world market, and, we can't forget for a minute, those commodities speculators.

Brian Woldt, a Lake County farmer and a member of the board of managers of the Dakota Ethanol plant near Wentworth, put all of this in prospective in a recent article in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. "Woldt says when people accuse ethanol of driving up prices he points out that when corn is fed to a cow, one-third of the energy will come out of the animal's mouth as CO2, one-third is absorbed as nutrients and one-third will be expelled as starch in the waste.

"YOU TAKE THAT same pound of corn and run it through an ethanol plant, you get the same third of CO2, the same third of nutrients that can be fed to animals, and the starch is a fuel producer.

"When they understand the real feed value of the corn is remaining, the light bulb comes on. But that doesn't get much coverage."

There's no doubt about it, ethanol lately has been getting a bad rap in the national media. This all adds up to more problems for our farmers, our ethanol production facilities, their investors and the lawmakers, both in South Dakota and Washington, D.C., who have made the laws that have helped this industry get off the ground.

ALL THIS BAD press about ethanol could also very well scare off the investors of the future who will empower today's ethanol plants as well as those of tomorrow to get this industry away from corn to using nonedible elements like corn cobs, corn stocks, grasses of various kinds, wood chips and maybe even municipal wastes that end up today in our landfills (dumps).

When I think of ethanol I think of that 10 percent of the fuel in my car's tank is 10 percent less gasoline that comes from an industry that finds an alternative fuel so offensive to its profits. Nationally, about five percent of the motor vehicle fuel is ethanol. because of the recently passed federal legislation, that five percent is going to jump to about 30 percent. Yes.
There's a reason for this--it's called the renewable fuel standard and we can't let that be taken away from us.

No. It isn't the ethanol that is driving up prices. Unfortunately, people are not thinking very far ahead not to realize what the real culprit is. Its name is pure and simple. Oil. As a friend of mine often writes, "Think about it."....

Gordon Garnos was long-time editor of the Watertown Public Opinion and recently retired after 39 years with that newspaper. Garnos, a lifelong resident of South Dakota except for his military service in the U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Presho.