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• In 2008, the journal Science published a study with a dire conclusion: Plowing over conservation land releases so much greenhouse gas that it takes 48 years before new plants can break even and start reducing carbon dioxide.
• For an ethanol policy to work, the study said, farmers could not plow into conservation land.
• The EPA, in a report to Congress on the environmental effects of ethanol, said it was "uncertain" whether farmers would plant on farmland that had been set aside for conservation.
• The Department of Energy was more certain. Most conservation land, the government said in its response to the study, "is unsuitable for use for annual row crop production."
• America could meet its ethanol demand without losing a single acre of conservation land, Energy officials said.
• They would soon be proven wrong.
• Before the government ethanol mandate, the Conservation Reserve Program grew every year for nearly a decade. Almost overnight, farmers began leaving the program, which simultaneously fell victim to budget cuts that reduced the amount of farmland that could be set aside for conservation.
• In the first year after the ethanol mandate, more than 2 million acres disappeared.
• Since Obama took office, 5 million more acres have vanished.
• Agriculture officials acknowledge that conservation land has been lost, but they say the trend is reversing. When the 2013 data comes out, they say it will show that as corn prices stabilized, farmers once again began setting aside land for conservation.
• ___
• Losing conservation land was bad. But something even worse was happening.
• Farmers broke ground on virgin land, the untouched terrain that represents, from an environmental standpoint, the country's most important asset.
• The farm industry assured the government that wouldn't happen. And it would have been an easy thing for Washington to check.
• But rather than insisting that farmers report whenever they plow into virgin land, the government decided on a much murkier oversight method: Washington instead monitors the total number of acres of cropland nationwide. Local trends wash away when viewed at such a distance.
• "They could not have designed a better approach to not detect land conversion," said Ben Larson, an agricultural expert for the National Wildlife Federation.
• Look closely at the corn boom in the northern Great Plains, however, and it's

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