The quality of our speakers was outstanding. Thank you very much to Dr. Bill Rooney, Tillery Sims, Dr. David Baltensperger, Randy Rivera, and Representative James White.

 

The Corn Hole Tournament was extremely popular finishing well before halftime at our Super Bowl Party. The results were:

Thank you to all who attended and participated in the charitable fundraising for our TSTA Foundation educational efforts and scholarship fund! You made a difference; between the Corn Hole Tournament and the raffle at the President's Dinner, we added over $3600 to the scholarship fund!

 

A big thank you to Rusty and Rebecca Smallwood for organizing and running the Corn Hole Tournament! And a big thank you to all who provided a raffle item for the President's Dinner and entered the tournament or took chances on the raffle!

 

At the Business Meeting we elected new officers and a board members. Luke Turner is our new President, moving up from Vice President. Our President for the last year was Doug Richards, Rice Tec, and Doug moves into the Past President role remaining on the Board of Directors. Chad Kriegshauser moves from board member to Vice President. Brett Bamert was elected to serve a third year on the Board of Directors. Rachel Horton, Justin Seed Co., begins a three-year term on the Board of Directors. Congratulations to all and thank you for your service to this organization!

 

A state of the association was provided by outgoing President Doug Richards, who has accomplished excellent results in characterizing our memberhsip and identifying ways to move the association forward, and Exec. V.P. Bryan Gentsch.

 

Dr. Rooney profiled a study that has been ongoing for many years whereby he, and his fellow authors, characterized sorghum as the first row crop that may be annually harvested for profit, that can simultaneously serve as an important carbon sequestration crop. This is nothing short of groundbreaking research.

 

Tillery Sims, Texas Hemp Growers Association Board Member, provided an excellent, straightforward, and practical assessment of where hemp production is heading in Texas. Tillery and her organization are the only hemp group that truly represents farmers as all of us understand them. Tillery represents "the" hemp organization in Texas and gave an outstanding presentation.

 

Dr. David Baltensperger, Chair or the Soil and Crop Science Department at Texas A&M and Chair of the Texas State Seed & Plant Board shared a variety of topics with us including some additional information on the state of hemp research in Texas. David also provided some updates on the seed & plant board and answered a variety of questions about all manner of things. David is always the right person to query about virtually anything regarding Texas agriculture - that has been our experience. Something of particular interest David shared was that undergraduate enrollment in agronomy was very low just now despite there being almost limitless current opportunities in agriculture. David is always appreciative of the scholarships we, and others, provide but requested we be diligent about preaching the opportunities in ag these days so good students consider it a dynamic area of study. While undergraduate enrollment hovers in the mid 70s at A&M job postings are closer to 120 and thus there are more positions than can be filled with qualified candidates. (There's a related article on this topic below.)

 

We are also very appreciative of Randy Rivera, from the Texas Department of Agriculture, providing important program related updates. Thanks, too, to Mark Bills, from TDA, who attended our meeting and answered questions.

 

 

The link is secure and the information will be used internally by the Texas Seed Trade Association and never shared without your permission. This request is on behalf of your association's board of directors and officers and we greatly appreciate your cooperation. Thank you!

 

 

The TSTA staff desires to share their opinion that it is in the best interest of the Texas seed industry if Representative James White is the next Commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture. Please consider casting your vote in the upcoming Republican primary election for Representative James White.

 

Rep. White was a member of the Texas House Ag Committee when first elected to the Texas House of Representatives. In that capacity he showed a keen interest in seed and voluntarily toured the East Texas Plant Materials Center with their staff and a member of the TSTA staff. Representative White has been a friend to Texas agriculture, and particularly the seed industry, for almost a decade and has consulted with us on a variety of issues he felt might impact our businesses.

 

Rep. White's primary focus in the Texas House has been law enforcement as a former law enforcement official and U.S. Army Military Police veteran. We have always been impressed with Rep. White's integrity, his commitment to candor, honesty, and his spirit of cooperation and openness.

A new study shows that the corn lobby's favorite fuel is worse for the environment than gasoline.

Lewis Morris as appeared in The Patriot Post

 

A study released this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) revealed that corn-based ethanol is likely doing more damage to the environment than if we used straight gasoline.

 

"Even without considering likely international land use effects," researchers said, "we find that the production of corn-based ethanol in the United States has failed to meet the policy's own greenhouse gas emissions targets and negatively affected water quality, the area of land used for conservation, and other ecosystem processes."

In other words, ethanol is a failure.

 

But that's not what we're supposed to hear. We have been told since the government forced us to use alternative fuel blends — the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) — in 2005 that ethanol is grand. Putting corn in our gas tanks would reduce our dependency on foreign oil, reduce our carbon emissions, and just make us all around better people. So said the environmentalists. With few exceptions, so said the Republican and Democrat presidential candidates who wander through Iowa every few years. And, of course, so said the media.

 

We were treated to a completely different set of outcomes, the most obvious being that ethanol did not save us any money at the pump. The PNAS study lists several others, obtained from a thorough examination of the RFS in its totality, from the planting of the corn to the processing of the fuel to the pumping of your gas.

 

According to the study, in the years 2008-2016, the RFS led to a 30% increase in corn prices. Prices of other crops rose by 20%, along with a multitude of grocery items that rely on corn. Cereal, anyone? Corn cultivation in the U.S. expanded by 8.7%. And to be clear, this expansion, along with the outsized impact corn has had on food prices, was driven overwhelmingly by the need for corn as a biofuel, not as a food source.

 

Along with all this corn came fertilizers, and there was a nationwide annual increase of up to 8%. Overuse of the land depleted the soil, caused soil erosion, polluted natural water sources, and diverted water from other crops. It takes three gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol.

 

When taking all factors into account, even the use of gasoline to run the tractors that till the soil (which releases carbon into the atmosphere), the PNAS study found that ethanol-treated gasoline is 24% more carbon intensive than conventional gasoline.

 

This finding totally contradicts what the Department of Agriculture had to say about ethanol in its own 2019 study, which found that ethanol was 39% less carbon intensive than gas. Gee, a government study that found a government program was working perfectly. Imagine that.

 

To be fair, the Agriculture Department study did not perform a holistic analysis of the entire RFS program, so its numbers may depend on the context. Or at least, that is probably the argument that ethanol's staunch defenders will use when asked about the disparity.

 

The Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol lobby group, was more direct in its response to the PNAS study. "Completely fictional and erroneous," said Geoff Cooper, the group's president and CEO.

 

Naturally, many who stand to lose something from the disappearance of ethanol will fight to keep it. It's the law of government inertia. Failure alone does not kill a bad policy. Only enough people accepting the truth can do that.

 

If we truly are serious about creating effective biofuels that will not harm the environment, then we need to be honest about the performance of ethanol. The technology isn't there yet, but it may be soon. America is by far the world's largest producer of biofuels, responsible for 47% of global output in the last decade. This is a market we can dominate, if we produce a quality product that does what it says it does. It's time to admit the failure that ethanol has become, learn from it, and move on.

 

Source: Renewable Fuels Assn news release

 

A new report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation, purports to examine the "environmental outcomes" of the Renewable Fuel Standard. In keeping with their previous "research" on biofuels and the RFS, the authors of this new paper precariously string together a series of worst-case assumptions, cherry-picked data, and disparate results from previously debunked studies to create a completely fictional and erroneous account of the environmental impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard.

 

The claims in this report simply don't align with reality and the facts on the ground, and the paper reads more like a fantasy novel than a genuine piece of academic literature. It should not be taken seriously.

 

In fact, when related research from some of the same authors was released several years ago, representatives from RFA and corn grower organizations met with this study's lead author, Tyler Lark, at the University of Wisconsin, in an attempt to begin a constructive conversation about today's ethanol industry and the real impacts of biofuels policy.

 

At that time, we shared data and information with Lark and his colleagues and asked how we could collaborate on research. We asked how we could work together to ensure their error-ridden satellite analysis of land-use changes was grounded in reality. We never heard back from them.

 

RFA is always open to having an honest, fact-based discussion about the impacts of ethanol and the RFS on the environment and economy. We have a great story to tell, and the data to back it up. Ethanol already reduced GHG emissions by roughly half compared to gasoline, and we are on a trajectory to achieve a net-zero emissions carbon footprint for ethanol by 2050 or sooner. Unfortunately, the authors appear more interested in slandering farmers and getting salacious headlines than examining the facts.

 

Click here for a more detailed rebuttal from RFA that offers key facts about ethanol's environmental impacts that were purposely omitted from the paper.