Edgington Letter: The RFS Does Work
by Chris Edgington (Globe Gazette) … Today, energy represents 5.2 cents of every dollar spent on food versus 6.8 cents in 2008. According to the USDA the average grocery bill is up 1 percent in 2015 vs. 2014 and yet the Energy Information Administration reports that the price of gasoline is down by $1.03 per gallon. It looks like the price of food should be dropping, not rising.
Today, American farmers produce almost 14 billion bushels of corn compared to 8.5 billion bushels before the RFS was first passed. The ethanol industry utilizes 5 billion bushels of corn for the production of ethanol but it returns 30 percent of that back to the livestock industry as a high-quality feed product. This means we actually have almost 2 billion more bushels of corn today to be utilized in all forms than we had before the RFS was passed.
