Iowa Disappointed by EPA’s Ruling on Biofuel

Jun 29, 2023

Iowa Republican lawmakers and biofuels interest groups expressed disappointment after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that holds steady the amount of corn-based ethanol that oil refiners must blend into the nation’s fuel mix over the next three years.

While increasing blending volumes overall by raising the level for advanced biofuels, the new rule includes lower mandates for ethanol in 2024 and 2025 than the EPA had initially proposed.

Industry officials, farm advocates and members of Iowa’s congressional delegation said the levels ignore production capacity and projected growth in biofuels. The industry is an important market for Iowa farmers because more than half of the state’s corn is used to produce ethanol.

While the overall increased volumes for biodiesel are a slight improvement, it comes at the expense of ethanol, “therefore pitting one biofuel against another,” Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig said in a statement.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said “biofuels can play a key role in fighting off this energy crisis and provide millions of Americans with cheaper, cleaner burning fuel.”

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.