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• But the EPA's model assumed only a tiny increase in corn prices.
• "You adjust a few numbers to get it where you want it, and then you call it good," said Adam Liska, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at the University of Nebraska. He supports ethanol, even with its environmental trade-offs.
• When the Obama administration finalized its first major green-energy policy, corn ethanol barely crossed the key threshold. The final score: 21 percent.
• "If you corrected any of a number of things, it would be on the other side of 20 percent," said Richard Plevin of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. "Is it a coincidence this is what happened? It certainly makes me wonder."
• It didn't take long for reality to prove the Obama administration's predictions wrong.
• The regulations took effect in July 2010. The following month, corn prices already had surpassed the EPA's long-term estimate of $3.22 a bushel. That September, corn passed $4, on its way to about $7, where it has been most of this year.
• Yields, meanwhile, have held fairly steady.
• But the ethanol boom was underway.
• ___
• It's impossible to precisely calculate how much ethanol is responsible for the spike in corn prices and how much those prices led to the land changes in the Midwest.
• Supporters of corn ethanol say extreme weather -- dry one year, very wet the next -- hurt farmers and raised prices.
• But diminishing supply wasn't the only factor. More corn than ever was being distilled into ethanol.
• Historically, the overwhelming majority of corn in the United States has been turned into livestock feed. But in 2010, for the first time, fuel was the No. 1 use for corn in America. That was true in 2011 and 2012. Newly released Department of Agriculture data show that, this year, 43 percent of corn went to fuel and 45 percent went to livestock feed.
• Forty-four percent last year's corn crop was used for fuel, about twice the rate in 2006, according to the Department of Agriculture.
• The more corn that goes to ethanol, the more that needs to be planted to meet other demands.
• Scientists predicted that a major ethanol push would raise prices and, in turn, encourage farmers like Leroy Perkins to plow into conservation land. But the government insisted otherwise.

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