Investors line up for farmland in Germany to cash in on ethanol subsidies. Subsidized gold rush creates ecological disaster-Der Spiegel

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In 2011 Germany couldn't produce enough grain to meet its needs.

8/30/12, "Biogas Boom in Germany Leads to Modern-Day Land Grab," Der Spiegel, by Nils Klawitter

"Creating energy from corn once seemed like a revolutionary idea in Germany. But subsidies for the biogas industry have led to entire regions of the country being covered by the crop, and investors are eagerly waiting for local farmers' land to go for sale. Some of those farmers who lease their land say they have been "ruined."

Dairy farmer Renate Rahn has made it through a number of industry crises, including the mad-cow disease scare of 2001 and the dramatic fall in milk prices in 2009. "But now we're being brought to our knees," she says.

Low milk prices aren't the only thing threatening her. Rahn lives near the Eider River in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where she is having an increasingly hard time finding affordable land to lease for grazing her cows and growing their feed. Over the past four years, the average cost of leasing a hectare (2.5 acres) of land has skyrocketed from €250 ($315) to over €600 per year.

She and her fellow dairy farmers just lost even more corn fields to biogas companies. The corn grown there won't be used to feed any cows. Instead, it will be sent to a reactor for refinement. The facility, which functions somewhat like a cow's stomach, will be fed chopped-up corn twice a day. The corn is transformed into gases in the dome of the reactor. Energy-rich methane is then channeled into a combined heat and power unit (CHP) and transformed into electricity.

While dairy farmers like Rahn are being threatened by the low prices that food discounters offer for their milk, the biogas producers have nothing to complain about. Germany's Renewable Energy Act (EEG) has subsidized the energy the biogas companies produce for 20 years.

Rahn is now forced to feed her cows soy meal from Brazil, which is constantly growing more expensive. She knows she will lose the battle over the raw materials, and she blames politicians for having "ruined us."

The idea of processing foodstuffs into electricity was born when Germany's then-governing coalition was made up of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party between 1998 and 2005. It was eight years ago, in an age when farmers were being granted so-called "set-aside premiums" because of overproduction, and when renewable raw materials were being particularly promoted. Plans called for transforming Germany into a bio-wonderland by peppering it with numerous small eco-power plants. What resulted was a revolution in the fields, a subsidized gold rush -- and an ecological disaster.

An average-sized biogas facility requires 200 hectares of corn, and needs to be constantly fed. This hunger for corn has transformed the German landscape. Schleswig-Holstein used to be famous as the "land of horizons," but now walls of corn dominate the landscape from north to south. The same holds true in the roughly 160-kilometer (100-mile) stretch of land between Münster and Bremen, in Upper Swabia and in the low mountain ranges of the western Eifel region.

Corn is now being grown on 810,000 hectares in Germany, which is equivalent to half of the area of the eastern state of Thuringia. In 2011 alone, the increase in the amount of land used to grow corn was almost equivalent to the size of the southwestern state of Saarland -- with horrific consequences. For the first time in 25 years, Germany couldn't produce enough grain to meet its own needs."... via Tom Nelson

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