Ethanol is a Win-Win 2
Yesterday we discussed with John Crockett, Senior Energy Specialist with the State of Idaho’s Office of Energy Resources, some of the advantages and disadvantages of ethanol. Today, he focuses on the benefits to ag producers in Idaho.
(Crockett) “We’ve got a lot of this CRP ground. It might be very good ground to be growing oil seed crop to fuel our vehicles. Congressman Simpson used to promote that. Right now we don’t have much political direction from our Federal leaders. When you make ethanol you get two products. Ethanol and in the Mid-West it’s distiller dry grain. We haul that in by the hundreds of trainloads every week in Idaho to feed our dairies. It takes a lot of energy to make that dry grain. If you can feed it wet you’re much better off . They put that plant in Burley so they can have distiller’s wet grain and they feed that to the cows wet. It saves a lot of cost so we have a great niche. We also have niche on the same level with bio-diesel. You make bio-diesel, you end up with glycerol. We can clean that up and we can feed that to the cows.”
The presence and the acceptance of ethanol in Idaho tomorrow.
