U.S. Sen. Rob Portman
The Ohio Farmers Union joined eight other Ohio agricultural organizations in a recent letter urging Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, to continue to support the Renewable Fuel Standard.
The groups, including the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and the Ohio Ethanol Producers Association, cited several statistics showing the importance of Ohio’s ethanol industry to thousands of farming and working families across the state.
Since 2006, the RFS has mandated a minimum amount of renewable fuel be blended into transportation fuel in the U.S. According to stats from ethanol producers in Ohio, there are seven ethanol plants in the state producing over 500 million gallons of ethanol per year from corn purchased from 3,400 Ohio farmers. The Obama Administration has put off setting annual ethanol quotas through the U.S. EPA for more than a year. This has created uncertainty in the marketplace and may help ethanol opponents in Congress muster the political strength to roll back the RFS.
OFU and others are communicating with federal officials and elected representatives to keep up American progress in the renewable fuels arena.
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