Ethanol Fuel May Benefit Consumers and Producers More Equally in Future

The national push for ethanol as alternative fuel has Tennessee corn farmers increasing their acreage while livestock producers struggle to pay for corn to feed their animals.

The cost of corn increased to almost four dollars a bushel and some people worry that milk, meats and eggs will become more expensive.

While it may seem like corn producers are the only farmers who stand to gain from the fuel-shift to ethanol, University of Tennessee in Martin’s College of Agriculture’s dean, Jim Byford, says this is not the case.

“I think it will actually cause the cost of feed production and thus meat production and to go down and the reason is that once we make ethanol from corn we have a product left that’s called distiller’s grains, and distiller’s grains is nearly equivalent to corn. The only thing it does not have is sugar. We’ve taken that out to make the ethanol but we can easily replace that with molasses.”

Distiller’s grain is cheaper than corn.

Byford says that even though hogs and poultry can’t digest the fiber in distiller’s grains, researchers are coming up with ways to make it more digestible.

He says when this is fully developed livestock producers and consumers will stand to benefit from the move to ethanol fuel just as much as grain producers.