Delta Farm Press. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has changed a reporting category in its World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report to reflect that for a given bushel of corn used for ethanol, some of it returns as byproducts including animal feed.
When USDA first started reporting corn used for ethanol in May 2004, it listed the gross corn bushels as simply “ethanol for fuel,” giving the impression that 100 percent of each bushel is used for fuel ethanol. US corn farmers produced 12.5 billion bushels of corn in 2010-11 and USDA projects that 5 billion bushels will be used by the ethanol industry. Without the clarification, a layman would figure that 40 percent of the US crop went into ethanol production.
…But the real story is that one-third of every bushel used in the ethanol process returns to the animal feed market in the form of distillers grains, corn gluten feed or corn gluten meal. When you consider this, corn used for ethanol drops to 23 percent of US corn production, a big difference.
In the 8 April WASDE, USDA changed the category to “ethanol and byproducts”: corn used to produce ethanol and by-products including distillers’ grains, corn
gluten feed, corn gluten meal, and corn oil. The change does not reflect the relative proportions.
The Renewable Fuels Association projects that the ethanol industry will produce more than 39 million metric tons of animal feed in 2010-11—nearly equal to the combined amount of corn produced by Mexico and Argentina—the world’s fourth- and fifth-leading corn producers.