Guy Wheatley
The Texarkana Gazette

I sat looking across the highway in front of my house at a field of grass that had been growing uncut since May or June. It was late September or Early October. The air was cool and dry and a gentle breeze caused the seedheads to wave gently back and forth. The afternoon sun was bright without being hot, and illuminated large insects occasionally flitting from one stalk to another. The sounds of birds, insects, and rustling weeds drifted peacefully to me, along with the smell of hay and drying leaves.
As I bring that sleepy memory back from the mid-1980s, another thought comes to mind. America uses close to 3 billion barrels of oil per year.
OK. I know that seems like a big jump, but just hang in there and I'll explain.
The pastoral scene described above was a field that belonged to a farmer in Southeast Arkansas. For as long as I can remember, it had been planted in grain crops such as oats or wheat. Rice is a cash crop in that area, but this particular field was too hilly for rice levies, so it got oats, wheat, and occasionally soy beans.
The American farmer is a model of efficiency. With hybrid grains, modern equipment, and chemicals, they were producing more grain, in the 1980s, than we could even pretend we knew what to do with. As a result, the price of grain crops plunged. It cost more to grow the stuff than they could sell it for. They couldn't just change crops. A combine back then cost upwards of $100,000. Changing from grain to another crop would have meant replacing, or extensively modifying that equipment. They would have gone bankrupt long before they finished retooling.
So, the government stepped in. It subsidized prices by buying up excess grain at a guaranteed price. Now the government had a lot of grain that it bought with your hard-earned tax dollars. The grain couldn't be sold. If there had been any market for it, the government wouldn't have had to buy it in the first place. Fortunately some bright policy maker came up with a solution. Use more tax dollars to build or rent silos to store the grain.
This cycle continued for several years, until another one of those unusual flashes of inspiration struck a public servant. "It will be cheaper," he reasoned, "to pay the farmers BFORE they grow the grain. That way, we save the cost of storing it." A new government program was born.
To prevent farmers from double dipping, by accepting payment to not raise wheat, then raising oats and selling it to the government, farmers were paid to leave fields fallow. In some cases they were paid to plant specific wild grasses and leave the field untouched for several years. Hence the field in front of my house.
It's too bad we can't get these guys producing something that we're in short supply of. Say ... oil.
It turns out we can. We have the technology to do it. We've been making ethanol and biodiesel out of grain products for years. Nothing needs to be invented or discovered. Those with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are, raise objections such as cost, production capacity, and non-energy petroleum products. These are bogus objections that pointedly ignore the hidden costs of foreign petroleum, recent developments in chemical processing and the economy of scale when bio production starts. The cost of petroleum will continue to go up while the cost of bio energy will decrease as a fledgling industry learns from experience.
We still produce more than a billion barrels of oil per year domestically. That is more than enough to help us through the transition to a new energy source. Refineries can be converted into processing plants. We will still need distributors. Mom and Pop gas stations won't notice any difference.
American oil companies will have to think outside of the box. Since this is in the national interest, it's not unreasonable to expect some government support. The good news is that all of the money would say here in the United States. It would first go to the construction industry to build processing plants, then later to plant workers.
Recent events merely highlight a gripe I've had for years. It burns me that we have to make nice to some people just because they're sitting on top of a lot of oil. I'm tired of people, whose economy is based on our consumption of their product, treating us like dirt. I'm tired of American dollars going to people who funnel it to terrorists. I resent subsidizing the oil industry with military and political intervention, tax credits and use of public lands.
If we buy fuel from American farmers, then every dollar we spend on energy will go into the American economy instead of terrorists training camps. Instead of subsidizing farmers to grow grass, we can put them to work meeting our national energy needs. Instead of subsidizing oil companies to mess up the landscape and send money and jobs to the Middle East, we can jump start the infrastructure needed to process renewable crops into products like biodiesel and ethanol putting tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in the process.

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