Ethanol's detractors have been around almost from the beginning, and we have heard most of their arguments for some time. Lately, it seems the opponents of ethanol have been getting more numerous and more strident in their opposition of ethanol having any future in our country's energy plan.

Ethanol will never replace gasoline gallon for gallon for many reasons. The main reason is that we do not have the corn producing capability to do so. Cellulosic ethanol is on the horizon, but until more research is done, it is too early to predict the impact of cellulosic ethanol.

What ethanol will do is offer another choice when filling at the pump. In Iowa, we can buy straight unleaded gasoline or gasoline with a blend of 10% ethanol. Typically, the ethanol blend is cheaper by five cents a gallon. Yesterday, I saw locally unleaded gasoline at $3.35 a gallon and the 10% ethanol blend at $3.29. Some places offer a blend of 85% ethanol. If your vehicle is equipped to burn it, there is an even greater savings.

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The newly constructed ethanol plants have added to the refining capacity of our country, something that has been in short supply since the 1970s when the last crude oil refineries were built.

A Wall Street Journal editorial dated May 18 told of the problems ethanol has created because of the higher price for corn. According to the Journal, ethanol's increasing share of the consumption of corn has made it difficult for creators of corn sweeteners. The livestock industry and environmentalists are alarmed at what will happen to (what else?) the environment.

Last week I received a magazine in the mail titled The American. The cover told of an article inside the magazine that was going to answer the question, "Is the biofuels boom headed for a bust?" Opening the magazine to the page where the article began showed the article's title as "Biofuels or Bio-fools?"

The writer told of venture capitalists that were making large sums of money available to those people developing ethanol from cellulose. The article told of the political influence of ethanol going as far as using the term "Big Corn."

I have heard of Big Oil and Big Tobacco, but Big Corn is a first. The author used ADM as one of the members of Big Corn along with corn growers and organizations promoting renewable fuels. Use of the phrase Big Corn is a pejorative term and reveals the writer's agenda.

This same article referred to farmers as "bootleggers" referring to the days of Prohibition when bootleggers needed the law that created Prohibition to make their profits.

Toward the beginning of the article, the author told of an ethanol plant in the state of Indiana that was built in 1984 and produced a smell like "baking bread that had gone wrong." I live across the road from an ethanol plant and about twice a month when the wind is from the southwest (a requirement), I get a smell of fermentation. The mayor of our town described it as a smell like "stale beer" and I would have to agree. I have smelled worse, much worse, in my life.

This writer used research done by Pimental and Pavek, research that has been disproven by several different organizations, to explain that ethanol requires more energy than it creates. The last time I heard David Pimental attempt to justify his shoddy conclusions he was including the energy it took to build the farm equipment used in corn production in the energy used to produce ethanol.

Pimental's explanation also implies that states like Iowa were growing something other than corn until ethanol came along. My Iowa farm grows corn the way the auto industry builds automobiles. That is what we do. It is our business.

Ethanol detractors seem surprised we corn growers would try to grow every bushel we can. We were doing that long before ethanol appeared. These same detractors like to hand wring over the fact we will not be able to grow enough corn to meet the increased demand. Nowhere in their fretting of the future do they acknowledge that corn yields have been trending upwards for over 50 years. A few years ago, an annual corn crop of 10 billion bushels would have collapsed the market. In 2007, we are doing everything we can to grow 12 billion bushels or more.

These same hand wringers like to bemoan the increased use of pesticides and the damage it will do to the environment. If you believe that, then it is time to be educated on the current crop of pesticides. Glyphosate is a key ingredient in Roundup. Put "glyphosate" in Google and read what is used to make it and how persistent it is in the soil.

Ethanol's naysayers like to use livestock producers as a victim of higher corn prices. A few weeks ago, I talked to man in northern Iowa about an hour's drive from where I live who feeds two thousand head of cattle at a time. When asked what he had done to allow for higher priced corn in his cattle feeding operation, he told me had resumed cracking the corn for better utilization. His cattle feeding operation was doing well because feeder cattle had gone down in price offsetting the higher price for corn.

He was also buying the wetter form of the DDGS from an ethanol plant as part of his feed ration and was an enthusiastic user of that part of the corn left after the distilling process has removed the starch leaving the protein.

Feeding DDGS to cattle is easy as cattle are best equipped to get the most from it, but what about the hog producer? I received an e-mail version of a farm newsletter and in it was a message from a hog producer in southern Minnesota. She used real numbers in showing what higher priced corn had done to their cost of feeding hogs.

On their hog operation, they feed hogs to 265 pounds requiring 662.5 pounds of feed. Their ration is 65% corn that translates to 431 pounds of corn or 7.7 bushels. When corn was $1.80 last August, that corn cost $13.86. Currently, corn is $3.43 a bushel and those 7.7 bushels of corn cost $26.41. On a 200 pound carcass, the corn has increased the cost of production by 13 cents a pound. If (a very big if) that cost were passed on to the consumer, it results in an additional 1.5 cents in a 4-ounce serving of pork.

A similar story can be told about the value of corn in a box of cereal or wheat in a loaf of bread. The USDA makes those numbers public.

Nowhere in these painful cries of higher corn prices resulting in higher food prices does anyone address the higher cost of transportation from higher fuel prices. If food prices increase, it would be good to know how much of the increase went toward the movement of the food from grower to processor to retailer.

Last August I read a column by conservative writer Jonah Goldberg complaining about tractor driving welfare queens. It seems once a year Goldberg has to drive across the Midwest and on this trip he was having a hard time finding a good cup of coffee along with seeing farmers who were living off their government payments buying tractors with the money received from the farm program. Goldberg's reference using the phrase welfare queens was used back in the Reagan administration when it was welfare queens driving Cadillacs. It was an attempt to portray that money was being wasted on those who did not need it or deserve it.

Goldberg's August column appeared just before the corn market started its rise in price in mid-September and things have not been the same since. What I am struck by is that if I am growing corn under the cost of production and receiving government payments through the farm program, I am a welfare queen. But when corn is priced so that I can grow it with a profit, then I am an "unscrupulous farmer" who should be taxed for my "excessive profits." Those quotations were from a man in Arizona responding in the comments section to a recent article that appeared in a London newspaper telling of the problems resulting from corn's higher prices.

Yes, I am a corn grower and yes, not only am I an ethanol investor, I also have an ethanol plant across the road from me that has been producing ethanol since 2004. The almost nonstop sound of the corn grinders is part of my everyday life. It can be accurately said that I am biased in favor of ethanol for many reasons but it can also be said that I have firsthand knowledge of corn and ethanol production for many reasons as well. Ask me a question; I will give you an answer.

I would say to any writer who wants to tell all the facts on the impact and future of ethanol, especially to those writers on the East and West Coasts, that if you are going to write about corn production in Iowa, then come to Iowa or any corn and ethanol producing state in the Midwest. Come out here and get your hands dirty with the rest of us. It means you will also have to get out of your car.

Talk to the people who produce the corn, spread the fertilizer, spray the herbicides, feed the livestock, and distill the ethanol. Do not sit at your desks and only gather information off the Internet or make phone calls to those whose opposition is already known.

Do not offer up as facts those threadbare, hackneyed arguments that are circulated like so much old gossip. If you cannot talk to the people getting the job done, then you are wasting your time as a writer and my time as a reader. Keep your knee jerk reactions to yourself.

I say that as a bootleggin', tractor drivin' welfare queen.