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native prairies and land set aside for conserving habitat.
• In Des Moines, Iowa, the water utility was strained to the brink this summer as it tried to remove the nitrogen fertilizer residue from drinking water to keep it within safe standards. Some of that fertilizer runs into the nation's rivers, worsening a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that can no longer support marine life. Farmers also planted on hilly, erodible soil, which encouraged erosion and the loss of topsoil.
• Q: But ethanol helps reduce global warming?
• A: That was the intent. But sometimes farmers create cropland by plowing over grassland. Grassland keeps carbon dioxide locked up in the soil. Plow over it, and that gas is released. It can take decades to make up for that loss.
• Under Obama, more than 5 million acres of land that had been set aside as conservation land was transformed from grass field back into farmland. That's the size of Yosemite, Yellowstone and Everglades National Parks combined. At least another 1.2 million acres of prairieland in the Great Plains have been plowed over for corn. Many environmentalists and scientists now question whether the ethanol mandate will ever accomplish its primary environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.
• Q: The ethanol industry disputes those numbers and says no virgin land has been lost. What gives?
• A: The government only started tracking this in 2012. The USDA concluded 38,000 acres were lost that year. And farmers in the Dakotas told AP reporters that they were plowing into pristine prairieland. So it's not a question of whether it's happening. The question is on what scale. The government has made it impossible to determine that number precisely. So the AP used the only method available to estimate it: Government crop data collected by satellite. The AP identified tracts of land that were cornfields in 2012 and had been grassland in 2006. The AP then excluded land lost from the Conservation Reserve Program to prevent double counting. The AP vetted this methodology with an independent scientist at South Dakota State University who has published peer-review research on land conversion using the same satellite data.
• Q: This must have been factored into the equation when the government wrote this policy, right?
• A: Quite the opposite. Scientists and environmental groups warned this might happen but the government and powerful agriculture companies argued it wouldn't. By law, the Environmental Protection Agency was supposed to study whether air and water quality have suffered because of the ethanol policy. That never happened.

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