Archer Daniels Midland, a colossus among the world’s agricultural giants, has announced that it will consider crops other than corn for ethanol production.

This is huge news, but ADM is being cagey about what that actually means. Are they going to promote crops that require little fertilizer and can be grown on U.S. soil? Or are they going to import cheap Brazilian sugarcane?

First of all, weaning America off oil means weaning America off corn. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma has a fantastic section tracing the path of industrial corn from the field to processed foods to the plate. (Soon after reading it, I ate a piece of candy shaped like an ear of corn, tasting vaguely like the buttered popcorn flavor of Jelly Bellies, and presumably composed primarily of high fructose corn syrup. It was a meta meta meta moment.) As he points out, “When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.”

One alternative to ethanol made with corn is so-called “cellulosic ethanol,” whose advantages and disadvantages are laid out pretty well in this wire article. Cellulosic ethanol is made from woody crops (like switchgrass) or industrial byproducts like wood chips.

Fans of switchgrass include such unlikely allies as:

George W. Bush:

To achieve greater use of “homegrown” renewable fuels in the United States, advanced technologies need to be perfected to make fuel ethanol from cellulosic (plant fiber) biomass, which is now discarded as waste. The President’s 2007 Budget will include $150 million—a $59 million increase over FY06—to help develop bio-based transportation fuels from agricultural waste products, such as wood chips, stalks, or switch grass. Research scientists say that accelerating research into “cellulosic ethanol” can make it cost-competitive by 2012, offering the potential to displace up to 30% of the Nation’s current fuel use.

And Al Gore:

Also, the building of an infrastructure for cellulosic ethanol, where you don’t need petroleum for the processing of it so the energy balance is completely positive. Then you can have truly renewable transportation fuels. And we’re not far off from a new generation of fuel cells that can also burn cellulosic ethanol, so you can grow your own electricity.

But that expends energy as well.

Growing it?

Yes.

It depends. If it’s material like switchgrass and sawgrass [native North American crops], you can have no-till agriculture without the chemically intensive techniques that are used commonly for corn and wheat now. Corn may play a role in this, but it’s not the way to go. In Oakridge National Laboratory, near my home in Tennessee, they have the nation’s top research center on alcohol fuels, and they have these detailed maps of soil types and climate conditions everywhere in the country that can be used to decide exactly which kind of plant in which region gives the most efficient yield, and how you can use the waste product from that plant as a source of energy for the processing. So a lot has happened since the old gasohol debates of the ’70s and ’80s.

Sounds good, right? So how should the government encourage companies like ADM to tiptoe out of the cornfield and make the switch?