Livestock remain corn’s #1 customer

Despite media outlet, Bloomberg’s recently released story titled, “Ethanol Eats More Corn Than Cows,” cattle, chickens and the rest animal feed industry still rank number one when it comes to consuming corn.

Bloomberg uses the direct corn use numbers showing that ethanol will consume 5.1 billion bushels and livestock will consume 4.6 billion bushels making a 500 million bushel difference. But they don’t take into account the amount of distillers grain being consumed (ethanol’s co-product which displaced the need for 1.2 B bu of corn) and the amount of exported corn being consumed by cattle (around 1.5 B bu).

It’s important for people to remember that corn ethanol production only uses two-thirds of the kernel. The rest is retained as DDG’s, a high protein and highly efficient animal feed which can be fed to cattle, hogs, poultry and aquaculture. The ethanol industry is expected to produce 42 million tons of it in 2012.

So let’s add up the overall usage of corn produced in America.

Ethanol = 3.4 billion bushels

Livestock = 7.3 billion bushels

Investigating just a little further clearly shows that livestock still eat twice as much of America’s corn when compared to ethanol making Bloomberg’s piece just another short-sighted folly by the mighty media.