Thorsten Arnold is an environmental scientist and farmer in Grey County, Ontario, working with the National Farmers Union on its ethanol campaign.
Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth (2025) makes the strongest mainstream case yet against burning cropland in fuel tanks. On ethanol, the National Farmers Union agrees with nearly all of it. But Grunwald shows that higher yields make it possible to use less land. He does not show what makes it happen.
This series supplies the missing view: the farm balance sheet. Three treadmills — technology, land debt and machinery — push farmers toward more production and more acreage even as yields rise. Ethanol turns all three at once. And a landscape stripped of its wetlands, woodlots and windbreaks stops working, as Ontario learned a century ago.
The series
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1. Michael Grunwald Is Right About Ethanol. But What Actually Spares the Land?
Grunwald and the NFU agree on the substance: land is never free, market-driven (indirect) land-use change was excluded of impact accounting, and the “bridge” to better biofuels keeps looping back to more corn. But his book leaves one question open. If a farmer raises corn yield by 10%, what makes 10% of the farm turn back into forest or wetland? Nothing does. Grunwald’s perspective acccounts for the carbon a hedgerow could store; the farmer counts the mortgage payment for land and machinery that the land cannot earn. Until something connects those two ledgers, land will not be spared — and Ontario’s ratchet toward 15% ethanol makes the gap wider. The first step is a moratorium – on this, we fully agree.
2. Three Treadmills and a Fuel Tank
A farmer grows 180 bushels an acre instead of 150. Grunwald sees less land needed; the farmer sees a competitive advantage; the bank sees earning capacity; the machinery dealer sees the sale of a bigger tractor. Three treadmills explain why higher yields or lower prices do not spare land: economic incentives drive everyone to produce more, higher returns become higher land prices and mortgages, and expensive machinery demands more acres in bigger, simpler fields. Each treadmill’s escape route is another’s entrance for more wilderness conversion. Biofuel mandates absorb the surplus and, in doing so, accelerates all three threadmills.
3. The Acre That Produces No Corn Is Not Empty
Stopping agricultural expansion is necessary to sustain planetary regulation functions. For today’s and future society at large, a wetland in a depression is not an acre failing to grow corn; it is water, soil and habitat infrastructure that keeps the working landscape working. Ontario learned this the hard way, when cleared sand plains in Norfolk, Simcoe, Durham and Bruce began to blow away about 100 years ago – our temperate Ontario Dust Bowl. Farmers learned stewardship by necessity – they planted millions of trees and rebuilt a landscape that breaks the wind and holds the dust. These forgotten heroers are worth remembering and celebrating! Today, rising land values and machinery scale are eroding that infrastructure again — and a stripped landscape itself drives further expansion.
4. Instead of Burning Corn, Pay Farmers for Ecological Function
Society already supports farm income; the question is what it pays agriculture to produce. Ethanol pays for more corn and gets less landscape. The alternative is to rent ecological function from farmers — around $200 an acre a year, or roughly $400 a year for a kilometre of windbreak that keeps snow off a road and soil on a field. The essay shows how to design such contracts so they are not simply priced into land, where a regulatory floor belongs, why “the world needs more food” is no argument for ethanol, and the policy package that starts with a moratorium. Not a final answer, but a good starting point of how to address root causes.
The world does not need more corn in Ontario fuel tanks. It needs working landscapes that can still feed people in 2080.
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