Corn vs Soy for Fuel

Washakie Renewable Energy is opening its Plymouth, Utah biodiesel plant soon and they are going to be crushing soybeans and canola seeds and making biodiesel fuel. I talked with Jeff Peterson, government affairs director and asked him to explain the advantages of these two crops over corn and ethanol, which have not exactly gotten great reviews. "The advantage that you get over corn is typically, whenever you start talking corn, you will immediately attract people who say you are just the next ethanol. It couldn't be more different. One of the biggest differences is that we can still use the rest of the product after we have extracted what we need from it and sell it back. You cannot do that with ethanol. The other issue you run into with corn is that it is colored a little bit differently as in a red dye. That makes it a little harder to sell. I'm thinking of farmers rubbing their hands together and saying beautiful, another rotation crop, would you encourage that line of thinking? Absolutely. The estimates we are looking at is that we will need close to 400,000 acres of soy for our plant. We can take 1300 tons per day of soy which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000,000 bushels per year. The more that we can buy in the Intermountain West the better off we will feel.