There are a number of issues there, Mr. Easter. Thank you for the comment.
What we find in our studies is that the biodiesel industry, of course, is much more expensive to establish than the corn-based ethanol, and the cellulosic ethanol is even more expensive. In the economic models we've been working on, along with colleagues at other universities in the midwest United States, biodiesel and cellulosic-derived ethanol never come into the optimal solutions. You can make them come in, but by pouring in a lot more money. They just don't come in. Of course the reason is that soybean oil and canola oil just become very expensive. When you just take a little bit off the market, it becomes very expensive and becomes very expensive to run a plant on that basis.
As for the feeds, there is distiller's dried grain, which is a byproduct of the corn-based and wheat-based ethanol. The products that come from wheat and from corn are two different products. But there are a number of nutritional issues involved with that. I don't care to go through that here today, and certainly I'm not a nutritionist, but I've spoken with many, and the fact of the matter is that a lot of the DDGs, the distiller's dried grains, that are being produced in the United States today are being used for fuel to power the ethanol plants, because it's cheaper than natural gas, or simply dumped into landfills. It's not being used for feed because of a lot of the feeding problems that are associated with it.
They anticipate in the future that some of these problems will be worked out, but it's certainly not a panacea. It's a high-protein feed, but it's not the kind of feed that is really required for much of livestock. It's not used for monogastrics; and for beef, we need the energy, we don't need the protein, generally.