Victims of the ethanol rush: Loss of the native prairie

The Great Plains of Kansas are being transformed by America's thirst for alternative fuels. Some are calling it an ecological disaster.

Beaumont, (pop 286, 70% Rep, 30% Dem,) is a town so tucked away in the Flint hills of Kansas that it boasts its own fly-in hotel. It is way off the beaten track, far from the bustle of the Interstates, the four-lane arteries that slice through the Great Plains. It was here that I met Pete Ferrell, a rebel rancher burning with anger at the way he says American agriculture is being subverted to the detriment of the planet.

And now almost unnoticed by urban America, one of the great ecological disasters of modern times is unfolding as an ethanol-fuelled gold rush engulfs the Great Plains and risks destroying what is left of North America's most endangered ecosystem, the native prairie.

The last 35 million acres of prairie, deliberately left alone to preserve a precious ecology, is being ploughed up to produce ethanol from corn. The tiny Beaumont hotel is famous (among aviators at least) for having three different guest registers: one each for pilots, motorcyclists and other guests.

Pete the rancher came striding in, wearing jeans and cowboy shirt and sat down in the small café overhung by aircraft memorabilia to tell his and Beaumont's story. For over 100 years his family has been fattening cattle on rich Kansas Bluestem prairie grass, among the last remaining stands of original prairie. Most of the tallgrass that once covered millions of acres of the Great Plains has been ploughed under. Only isolated pockets remain, some preserved by conservation grants. Now, even in the Flint Hills, what is left of the prairie is under threat as farmers race to cash in on a bonanza created by planting corn for ethanol production in order to ease America's worries about future fuel supplies.

The corn economy is nothing short of a disaster for the environment, for the farm economy and potentially for the Flint Hills, in Mr Ferrell's view. The prairie is some of the most fertile and productive land on the planet. Nowadays it has become the corn-and-soybean belt, with only remnants of the short-grass prairie providing grazing for livestock.