For farmers like me, summer means growing season.
For others, it marks the start of the summer travel season, and airlines are projecting that this could be the busiest season ever, with a record number of Americans looking to fly. Simultaneously, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe climate change needs to be addressed in the coming years, with more than half stating that action is necessary now. Building a sustainable future for flight is key to balancing growing demand for air travel with a desire to reduce carbon emissions. The solution can be found here at home.
Crop-based biofuels offer significant opportunities to decarbonize flight using homegrown feedstock and more sustainable on-farm agricultural processes. Biofuels’ drop-in nature means they are ready-to-use – today – while the development of more efficient engines and planes continues. The U.S. sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) industry is nascent, and government support of the farmers producing these lower-carbon fuels is still relevant.
There is an internationally-negotiated framework for carbon emissions known as the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), which favors European policy and practices. Policy guidance from the Biden administration will determine which SAF producers qualify for sustainable aviation fuel tax credits. A misguided decision on which model is adopted threatens farms across America, including my own, who are contributing to the country’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Corn is a major U.S. agricultural product, accounting for more than $18 billion in exports in 2022. America’s corn and soybean farmers will be integral to this sustainable aviation movement – with our crops serving as the feedstocks needed to produce sustainable, lower-carbon, and American-made biofuels, including SAF, while separately meeting feed demand for agriculture.
Biofuel feedstock production is safe for consumers and the environment. Our farms adhere to all local, state and federal regulations in place for land use, labor, environmental, and health and safety laws. The industry also adopts the latest advances in sustainable agriculture to improve our land use and reduce our carbon emissions, such as regenerative agricultural systems to enhance soil quality, reduce our dependence on synthetic fertilizers, and improve yields, all while reducing waste and emissions.
At my farm in Minnesota, we take the responsibility to be good stewards of our land and resources very seriously. Not only is it good for the environment, but also our livelihood – and the sustainability of our family, business, and rural American communities depends on it. For example, we use our cattle’s manure to fertilize our fields – organically enhancing soil nutrients while reducing the use of synthetic fertilizers. The decaying residue from past crops also enriches our soil, while conservation tillage like strip-till and no till helps us reduce fuel consumption and capture production-generated carbon emissions. These sustainable farming practices help shrink our carbon footprint and will be essential in helping aviation reach net zero by using American-made SAF.
If the international CORSIA framework is adopted as the basis for determining eligibility for U.S. SAF tax credits, many U.S. crop-based biofuels would be disqualified. Because the framework imposes criteria tailored to European farmers and producers, it conflicts with U.S. regulations and agricultural practices and fails to credit the carbon-savings practices American farms employ.
CORSIA’s flaws and harms to American agriculture don’t stop there. The framework would also require an audit of each SAF feedstock producer that is rooted in European regulations. My farm underwent a third-party CORSIA audit this year, and we passed all but one of the sustainability requirements because we used a rootworm-control treatment on our corn that is legal in the U.S. and abroad, but does not comply with the CORSIA sustainability certifier’s guidelines. This treatment is safe and essential for producing crop yields needed to feed and fuel the world.
Requiring U.S. farmers to comply with an international scheme favoring European regulations and norms is a burdensome process most farmers cannot afford – both in time and money. We operate on tight margins and cannot afford to lose an entire year’s worth of crops to regulations that were never intended to address American farming practices, ecosystems, and challenges. Furthermore, American agriculture has always been the world leader in efficiency, technology, safety, and production so adopting a European system would be a step backwards. Regulations must be sensible and workable so they are effective and widely adopted by American farmers.
As regulators consider varying frameworks for qualifying for SAF tax credits, they must establish clear, reasonable, and practical sustainability requirements tailored to U.S. agriculture. I urge the Biden administration to reexamine SAF tax credit criteria to protect American agriculture and sustainability efforts. We shouldn’t weaken our farmers’ ability to power America at such a critically important climate juncture.
Shawn Feikema is the owner of Feikema Farms in Luverne, Minnesota. Feikema Farms grows corn, soybeans, cattle and other agricultural products, as well as feedstock to Minnesota-based sustainable aviation fuel producer Gevo.
Growing corn for jet fuel, to reduce climate change is one of the most absurd ideas I’ve read on this site. Not sure why Minnpost publishes so many blatant PR pieces. I guess they have to make money somehow.
Agreed. But another distinction needs to be made, between big business farming and individual farmers, a distinction increasingly blurred during the past 70 years.
There are primarily two sources of CO2 in the atmosphere – that which is already there, and that which is being added, mostly through the burning of fossil fuels. The use of biofuels primarily uses, through photosynthesis, CO2 that is already in the atmosphere; thus, reducing the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere, by reducing the amount of fossil fuels needed. Yes, some is added by the production process, but overall biofuels results in a significant reduction in CO2 that would be added to atmosphere; and there is no feasible alternative for a liquid fuel for aircraft.
What you state is true in theory, but ignores the additional co2 produced by the refining process & inputs, like fertilizer. Lastly, is there even a form of biofuel approved for aviation use? I’m aware of experiments performed by DOD and others, but have not heard of anything being in use for commercial aircraft.
I happened to stream a show on Britbox called Landward, focused on agriculture and the natural environment in Scotland. Their approach to making agriculture more sustainable and reduce its carbon footprint is impressive. Many of the ideas they are working on would appear to have no parallels in the United States. Are Americans farmers so confident they have all the solutions that they are going to disparage and ignore European agricultural innovation? I hope not. In the world of ideas, the more the merrier.
Agreed.
I can’t wait for the chorus of ‘agriculture based fuels are bad for the environment and bad for everything else rant”. We need more windmills and solar panels.
Wind generators and solar panels are indeed our best bet– especially when grid-scale batteries are added to the mix.
Ethanol and bio diesel are farmer friendly cash crop products that keep corn and soybean prices attractive. However, for every tanker car of ethanol produced, FOUR tankers of fresh water from the regional aquifer are required. In some cases the aquifers do not replenish at the same rate.
This whole transition is going to disrupt the economics farmers have relied on to pay the bills. Economic disruption is the wild card in our race to get clean energy.
We are living through an existential climate change that will be difficult to pull off. The money may force us to continue what we know is a point of no return– even after that point has been passed.
Downright scary.
The problem is that Mr. Pilacinski is correct about the physics of atmospheric CO2, while Mr Owens is correct about the environmental burden of producing these crops. So no obvious win-win. But it’s not like we are going to actually reduce the amount of fossil fuel we employ to fly everyone wherever in hell they want to go, as often as they can afford. We just add biofuels to the uncontrolled, ever-increasing mix of aviation fuel consumed.
The answer, of course, is totally unpalatable: that humanity must actuslly reduce the amount of aviation fuel from petroleum sources, not keep increasing it. That’s the only way to actually reduce atmospheric CO2. But that would mean we’d need to ration aviation fuel, or ration air travel time, as though this was the existential battle that it actually is.
And today’s humans aren’t willing to make sacrifices like that for future generations, or to save the millions of innocent species that we are killing off by our promiscuous burning of fossil fuels, for air travel and everything else.
As to the concern of the author about his fuel crops, I presume the problem is that foreign air carriers refueling in the US want the fuel to be compliant with international standards. Whether slight changes to the treaty can be accommodated for the American farmer wiggle room he desires will be the job of lobbyists.
Here is a link to reality. Energy use in the world is exploding. Whatever we think we are doing with renewables, isn’t going to stop the steamroller of the 3rd world economies developing. What is going to happen when everybody in India has a car?
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix
In other words, don’t try to do anything about the looming ecological catastrophe, because India. Great advice!
Every day there is a new looming disaster that never appears. How long do things loom?
We do not have unlimited capital to address all the wants for ‘looming’ disasters.
That’s your quibble, the already existing climate change disasters aren’t bad enough enough already, and unless you see it get much worse I’m exaggerating the immediacy of the crisis? The catastrophe is here and will get worse every single year. And worse still, the more we bury our heads in the sand and quibble about nothing, like proper use of “looming”…
Climate change is the single most important crisis facing the world, and its disastrous effects are already here. So it’s the single most important thing the human race can devote its “capital” to. Is that clear enough as an opinion?
“That’s your quibble, the already existing climate change disasters aren’t bad enough enough already”
Yes. Where he says “Every day there is a new looming disaster that never appears,” he’s gaslighting us & claiming we’re not surrounded by climate change disasters every day. No canadian wildfires, no heatwave spanning the southern US coast-to-coast. No heatwave of ocean water bleaching Florida coral.
“Every day there is a new looming disaster that never appears.”
Kind of like “voter fraud.”
One of the more depressing aspects of “conservative” Republican mentalities is not simply their practice of being wrong about everything from morality to global climate change; but the fact that they NEVER get tired of being wrong and constantly double down on being wrong. So here we’re told that climate change is yet another imaginary liberal crises that hasn’t materialized. Meanwhile the existential threats of voter fraud, drag queens, and abortion, top the threat lists among “conservative” intellects.
The only almost as depressing as this decades long exercise in moral and intellectual depravity has been the weak and ineffectual response by “liberal” Democrats who for far too long accommodated this garbage simply because it emerged from the one of our only two political Parties.
We’ve already been through this with cars and trucks. The bio-fuel revolution didn’t reduce our CO2 emissions although it was something of a boost for farm revenue. There’s no reason to assume it will save us with airplanes. Meanwhile making farmers money and saving the atmosphere are obviously not the same agenda, and I would point out the fact that this a global crises requiring a global response and US participation in THAT global response; there is no “American” solution. Nationalism won’t save farmers from the droughts and flooding climate change denial is now pummeling them with.
OK, but… We should mandate someone to do something that won’t make any difference anyway because otherwise we would be doing nothing.