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clear. Farmers are converting untouched prairie into farmland.
• The Department of Agriculture began keeping figures on virgin land only in 2012 and determined that about 38,000 acres vanished that year.
• But using government satellite data -- the best tool available -- the AP identified a conservative estimate of 1.2 million acres of virgin land in Nebraska and the Dakotas alone that have been converted to fields of corn and soybeans since 2006, the last year before the ethanol mandate was passed.
• "The last five years, we've become financially solvent," said Robert Malsam, a farmer in Edmunds County, S.D., who like others in the central and eastern Dakotas has plowed into wild grassland to expand his corn crop.
• The price of corn is reshaping the land across the Midwest. In Wayne County, Iowa, for example, only the dead can stop the corn.
• A gravel road once cut through a grassy field leading to a hilltop cemetery. But about two years ago, the landowners plowed over the road. Now, visiting gravesites means walking a narrow path through the corn.
• People have complained. It's too narrow for a hearse, too rutted for a wheelchair, too steep for the elderly. But it's legal, said Bill Alley from the board of supervisors.
• "This is what the price of corn does," he said. "This is what happens, right here."
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• When Congress passed the ethanol mandate, it required the EPA to thoroughly study the effects on water and air pollution. In his recent speech to ethanol lobbyists, Vilsack was unequivocal about those effects:
• "There is no question air quality, water quality is benefiting from this industry," he said.
• But the administration never actually conducted the required air and water studies to determine whether that's true.
• In an interview with the AP after his speech, Vilsack said he didn't mean that ethanol production was good for the air and water. He simply meant that gasoline mixed with ethanol is cleaner than gasoline alone.
• In the Midwest, meanwhile, scientists and conservationists are sounding alarms.
• Nitrogen fertilizer, when it seeps into the water, is toxic. Children are especially susceptible to nitrate poisoning, which causes "blue baby" syndrome and can be deadly.
• Between 2005 and 2010, corn farmers increased their use of nitrogen fertilizer by more than one billion pounds. More recent data isn't available from the Agriculture Department, but because of the huge increase in corn planting, even conservative projections by the AP suggest another billion-pound fertilizer increase on corn farms

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