Editors' Notebook

Now that EPA's proposed numbers are out on how much renewable fuel the agency is recommending for 2014, the real jockeying over those numbers and what tweaked RFS number may portend for future years, can begin. Finalized RFS numbers are expected next spring, following a 60-day comment period that will start soon.

As we're reporting in news stories and in grain analysis comments, the proposed RFS may put further bearish pressure on corn markets. The change, which essentially equates to a drop to 13 billion gallons from the previously-mandated 14.4 billion gallons of corn ethanol, could reduce corn demand by 170 million bushels, according to DTN Senior Analyst Darin Newsom. Whether that's a minor hiccup or, as some farm groups predict, a huge economic setback, remains to be seen.

But as DTN Staff Reporter Todd Neeley chronicled earlier this week, the public relations and crisis management teams on both sides of the ethanol/fossil fuels aisles were already hard at work days ahead of the EPA announcement, following the "leak" of a portion of an Associated Press series that questioned the "greenness" of the U.S. ethanol industry. Both the Obama and the Bush administrations had touted, and the former still touts, ethanol as reducing greenhouse gases, making the United States more fuel independent, and creating jobs and other positive economic actions through a domestic industry.

The AP stories seriously questioned the environmental benefits of corn ethanol.

If you want to read through the whole series, it can best be found on the AP web site here: http://bigstory.ap.org/….

DTN is a long-time customer of AP and a daily user of its news stories. We also are occasionally a competitor with that massive news organization, particularly in coverage of commodity market events and farm policy news. I'm not ashamed to say there are days when we swell with pride when DTN reporters and editors beat "the wires" on critical agricultural coverage.

All that put this newsroom in a bit of an odd spot when deciding what to do with the AP series on ethanol as it began rolling out to customers like us on November 12. So I want to take a minute to be clear about that.

This series, by all accounts, is critical of modern farming, and of modern farmers. It sends some serious barbs in the direction of anyone growing corn and soybeans in a commercial way in this country. It has made a lot of folks in agriculture angry.

That is not, however, why you haven't seen those stories on DTN products. We didn't shy from running them because we were afraid to anger readers -- though I have no doubt we would have. We judged that AP series by the same news value standards as any other story whether sent to us by wire service partners or written by any one on the DTN/Progressive Farmer payroll.

Those criteria are: Is it valuable and worth busy readers' time? Is it complete and factual? Is it reported with balance?

By my accounting, the series got one out of the three. The pros and cons of the U.S. ethanol industry, now that we can look back over enough years to see trends, is a critically important issue and worthy of discussion. But in my book the series missed the mark on the other two criteria, and that relegated it to the cyber version of our cutting room floor.

It's not my desire here to pick apart someone else's writings. Anyone who's ever checked seed depth in spring or knows why proper fan speeds are important in a combine will find any number of places that will make them wonder how much reporters understood the business they decided to "investigate."

As for balance, most who read the rather bombastic headline and lead paragraphs of the initial story, which speak of brown scars and polluted streams and plowed up cemetery roads, understood that "balance" wasn't the purpose of this series.

If forced to put some detail to back up my point, I'll touch only on the core premise of the series, which was that a whole host of environmental and societal ills tallied in the past five to seven years can be laid solely at the feet of corn-based ethanol.

There was no real accounting, for the increase in demand from China, nor on a basically continuingly healthy U.S. meat demand. Not even a nod to the point that corn doesn't "disappear" into ethanol, the bulk is still available for livestock feed as distillers' grains.

There's plenty room for discussing the current state of crop production and any unintended consequences of that. It was the unabashed effort to blame any and all of them on ethanol -- the very week that EPA was to render a critical decision on the biofuel -- that gave those of us around the editing table great pause.

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