10-22 IAN Corn Ethanol

 Making sure cattle use their feed efficiently is key to affordable beef and sustainable businesses, says University of Idaho animal scientist Rod Hill. Hill, a livestock physiologist in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, has spent much of his career conducting feed efficiency studies on cattle. His studies range from monitoring the animal as it gains weight all the way to the molecular realm to understand how cattle grow and why there is so much animal-to-animal variation in feed efficiency. I had a fascinating discussion with him that took an ethanol turn.If I understand things correctly, take 2 cows that have very similar genetic structure,  feed them X number of pounds of corn a day,  one cow fattens efficiently and one cow doesn’t, metaphor that I’m thinking of using corn and ethanol, we have gone to fuel efficient cars because the price of gasoline is so high. Does that make sense? Yes there are some real parallels there. The feed efficiency is more about variation in intake for similar performance but the environmental impact of corn for ethanol can be debated but the numbers are aware not support it, as a  technology to be environmentally friendly but it is providing some fundamental knowledge so that other technologies might be developed by the dozen major effect on the cost of the in the beef industry and the dairy industry as well.