Actually, that may be a good thing.

The only reason we make ethanol from corn is because we grow so much of it. Corn isn't really a good source of ethanol because it's on the low end of how much you can make from it. It's also expensive to grow, due to the heavy fertilization required. I think the round figure for corn-sourced ethanol is about 600 gallons per acre. There are other plants that don't require the high growing costs of corn, yet produce more ethanol: sugar beets, forage beets, wild cattails, mesquite pods, etc. Cattails, growing wild, produce twice the amount of ethanol that corn does with heavy fertilization/herbicides/pesticides; if liquid effluent from city sewage systems were used to feed a series of cattail marshes (in rotation), the cattails cleanse the water and the amount of ethanol produced jumps from the basic 1200 or so gallons to around 10,000 gallons per surface acre.

Using corn for ethanol is silly and expensive. Why use prime farmland for something like that? Use marginal land for ethanol and good farmland for actual food production.

Sue