Food vs. Fuel or Food AND Fuel for Soybean Products?

by Forrest Laws (Farm Progress) Can the soybean industry provide food and fuel to the market without compromising? ... “Where we are now is incredibly exciting because we’ve got the bean oil piece that goes into this biofuel space, and it's creating this reduced cost of soy meal,” he (Mac Marshall, vice president for market intelligence with the United Soybean Board and the U.S. Soybean Export Council) said. “And, even with this surge from energy, animal agriculture still remains the number one consumer of U.S. soy products.

“With that meal getting cheaper we think that helps contribute to some degree of combating food insecurity through declining feed costs as they go into animal rations. So the way I see it, it’s not food vs. fuel – it’s food and fuel, and that we're meeting those twin needs.”

Going back to ethanol, he said, one of the things farmers understand but maybe the general public doesn’t, is that when you're talking 5 billion bushels of corn going into ethanol refineries, critics say a third of the crop is being used for fuel.

“But when you run it through an ethanol plant a third of that volume is coming back in the form of dried distillers’ grains,” he noted. “And what do you do with that? You use it for animal agriculture. So it wasn't food versus fuel then either. It was a new utilization channel, but it was also creating this off-take that creates another source of protein in the animal ag space.” READ MORE