This is a YouTube video titled "We Can All Agree On This" containing a conversation recorded in December 2019. The discussion involves multiple speakers, including Ask AI Mark, focusing on agricultural policies, specifically the ethanol mandate, its environmental impact, and the potential for regenerative farming to replace ethanol production on large tracts of farmland.
The Feed the World mantra was all done by Monsanto. And basically Monsanto said that, was a marketing genius, said that we all have to feed the world. This is our mission. And so the American, they had a lot of lobbyists. You tell a senator that we need to feed America, they're like, Of course we do. And they were almost too successful.
Yeah.
Because in the end, this is in the mid 2000s, The government said, Hey, wait a minute, we don't actually know what to do with this food. What are we going to do with it? There was not enough people in the.
World to produce about 300 more calories per person on the planet today. And we need to eat.
Produce enough calories for everyone in the 60s. Yeah. So we don't need more calories, but what happened is in the mid-2000s, the Bush administration was basically not going to get reelected. Because people who are farmers are older and they vote. And so we ran out of use of the corn, so he created the ethanol mandate so that any extra corn being grown would be forced to be used as ethanol. And it sounded good from an environmental perspective, it's been a disaster, but at the time it sounded good. And what it really was was a giant subsidy for those farmers. and it quickly grew to be 40% of our production. Stunning for a few years. Right now, you know, grown in ways.
That are destructive to the earth, that totally destructive.
Destroy our waterways. Destroying the waterways.
Creating climate change, soil erosion.
And this greatest sadness for me is preventing that land from being used by young farmers.
So it seems to me that, I mean, this is the first time I really put the whole ethanol mandate together, and I've been studying this for a while, so I don't know how I missed it, But just the idea came to me, well, if we have 25 million acres, 40% of our land that's used to grow ethanol that neither environmentalists or the energy industry think is a good idea, why not turn all that into regenerative farms and bring new farmers in and create a whole program of regenerative ag on these 25 million acres?
That is the right thing to do. That's absolutely the right thing to do.
It's like, what?
Yeah, and by the way, all the- and everybody wins. All you have to do is remove the ethanol mandate, and it would happen automatically because people would be forced to sell that land to regenerative farmers.
