stan moore wrote: > How much additional wildland will be put into grain production, > at the cost of habitat for wild flora and fauna? How many > forests will be cut down? How sustainable can this transition be?
In the upper Midwest USA, according to some agricultural economists at Iowa State University, "the most likely source of new corn acreage will come from shifts in crop rotation from soybeans to corn." http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/fall_06/article2.aspx http://www.card.iastate.edu/iowa_ag_review/fall_06/article3.aspx Example: instead of a traditional corn/soybean/corn/ annual crop rotation schedule, Midwestern farmers could implement a corn/corn/ soybean rotation schedule. I've seen evidence of this already happening : 2006 photo of corn fields on both sides of a farm road in southwestern Minnesota: http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k75/4af/mori06.jpg 2005 photo of the same exact farm road where you can see (left side of photo) corn was growing on the same piece of ground where it had been growing in 2006: http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k75/4af/mor05.jpg Another source of additional corn could come from the continually increasing yields that GMO biotech corn has been generating (e.g Roundup Ready Bt corn http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k75/4af/rr.jpg). Here's a graph of Iowa corn yields per planted acre over the 1980 to 2005 crop years and you can see how yields rose especially fast after the introduction of GMO crops in 1996 http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k75/4af/corngra.jpg Paul Cherubini El Dorado, Calif.
