So What's So Bad About Corn?

The Demand for Ethanol

Here in the town of Nevada, dead center in Iowa, you'll find Couser, a farmer, feedlot owner and ethanol entrepreneur. From many miles away, you can see rising from the fields of corn stubble the silo-like fermenting tanks of the new ethanol plant, Lincolnway Energy, where Couser serves as chairman of the board. At the plant, corn mash makes glucose and ferments into alcohol.

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"It's just an old still back in the woods. It's no different. It's just bigger," he says of the plant. "It's basically 200-proof corn whiskey."

A byproduct is a sawdust-like substance called dry distiller's grain with solubles -- huge piles of which are in a warehouse at the distillery, ready to be hauled off and fed to livestock somewhere in the Midwest. It's good feed, Couser said.

"And it smells good. Does this place stink?"

No: Much of the ethanol plant smells like a bakery. Yeasty.

Last year, the federal government banned a gasoline additive, methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), because it was polluting groundwater. Gasoline blenders needed another "oxygenate" -- designed to reduce air pollution -- and quickly turned to ethanol. Corn prices surged. American farmers planted 93 million acres of corn, up from 78 million a year ago -- the largest crop by acreage since World War II.

As if corn needed yet another boost, the political calendar ensures that the road to the White House starts in Iowa. One candidate after another has put on a hard hat and safety glasses and admired the ethanol plant in Nevada.

Republican Fred D. Thompson, a former opponent of ethanol subsidies, came through a few weeks ago and said he'd changed his mind. Democrat Bill Richardson gave a speech recently in Des Moines about major threats to the environment, but said of ethanol, "It's so far superior to our addiction to foreign oil, you have to go full speed ahead."

Bucking the trend is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who said recently in a speech in Ames, just down the road, that he opposes all government subsidies that distort the free market: "I've never known an American entrepreneur worthy of the name who wouldn't rather compete for sales than subsidies."

McCain, however, has never counted on getting many votes in Iowa. Because of his position on subsidies, he didn't even campaign here when he ran for president eight years ago.

'We Don't Have the Land'

Once, much of Iowa was a "pothole prairie," an open terrain pocked with wetlands. Now it is a completely managed landscape. It has few forests. You can search a long time in Iowa before finding anything that you could call the Wild.

If the nation's leaders have their way, there will be yet more corn here. The Energy Act of 2005 mandated the use of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2012, and that's just for starters.