> one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn)

This makes me quite sad - the idea of one of the best places in the world to grow crops being wasted on massive monocultures of these industrial crops.

Not only that - we also subsidize these useless crops. For some reason we grow corn just to burn it in car fuel as an additive. Corn is so subsidized it also becomes cheaper to add high-fructose corn syrup to everything instead of sugar.

Most of the corn in Illinois goes to feed, stuff that can’t go to feed is turned to ethanol. 2% goes to human consumption directly.

Also soy and corn is far from useless, these are considered two of the worlds staple crops. You’d likely starve to death without farming: wheat, corn, and soy. Even if you don’t eat it directly it what enables food to be affordable.

Ah yes, the famous corn fed to cows that then bloat because they can't digest it and need antibiotics to survive.

Brilliant.

It's the cheapest way to do it. Not saying it's the best way, but in studying history I've noticed that cheapest (particularly in food) tends to win in terms of production.

It's a real problem but I don't see how a snarky comment comes off as anything but rude or uninformative.

I guess it's only cheap because the corn is subsidized, and the societal cost of all that junk food is too finely dispersed to notice.

The carbon in that corn comes from the air. If we all burned corn fuel instead of oil found in the ground we'd be a lot better off in terms of emissions.

If we took the same amount of money which is used to subsidize corn and used it to fund research on batteries, solar cells, etc, or used the money to upgrade our power grid, or subsidized energy efficiency in homes, the money would have a far greater effect.

Yeah but what if you account for the synthetic fertilizer which is produced primarily from natural gas? And if it isn't produced from natural gas it requires near 100x as much electricity, which still currently comes from fossil fuels. If we produced all our fertilizer without natural gas we would consume the current total world's energy production.

That is incorrect. World ammonia production in 2016 was 175 million tonnes. Producing that much ammonia -- the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers -- requires about 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At present this hydrogen is indeed mostly made from natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

As of 2011, it required 50 kilowatt hours to produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis of water, or 50 megawatt hours per tonne:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-...

That comes out to a total of 1550,000,000 megawatt hours, e.g. 1550 terawatt hours, to make 31 million tonnes of hydrogen.

World electricity consumption in 2016 was 20,863 terawatt hours:

https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/

Producing the world's synthetic fertilizer starting from electricity instead of natural gas would require about a 7.4% increase in world electricity production: (20863+1550) / 20863 = 1.074. It is true that this would benefit the climate only if the extra electricity generation were based on low-emissions sources like hydroelectricity, wind, nuclear, or solar.

On the larger point, I think that corn-to-biofuel is a very poor use of money, land, and indirect fossil fuel inputs.

I think surplus food production capacity is a good thing to subsidize in case of unexpected, sudden supply decreases. Relying on market forces to respond to such events would be too slow. That said, maybe there's a better implementation than the current one.

Are you drilling for water in Illinois? I saw a lot of these round artificial rain plants when I once travelled the midwestern states. For me it was always counter-intuitive that you have to do this in an area that is considered the bread-basket of the world.

As far as I know, irrigating crops is only a thing west of the Missouri river. (Dakotas, Nebraska, etc.)

I live in Iowa, and we definitely don't irrigate crops here. (On a mass scale at least. Specialty crops and orchards have irrigation systems set up)

I'm a lot sadder at the fact that they can't find a workaround for that.

Hard to plant in a swamp. And even if you did manage to plant, much of the crop would be in danger of drowning or rotting before it ever had a chance.

What about rice paddies?

My understanding is that for commercial rice production, the paddies are drained both for planting and before harvest. I may be wrong on that.

Either way, the machinery used for planting corn and soybeans is developed for use on relatively dry ground. And the plants themselves cannot survive submersion for long periods of time.