Industrial Use

Not everything grown on American farms feeds a person. A substantial and often invisible portion of the agricultural system’s output flows into industrial uses: fuel tanks, pet food bowls, plastics, lubricants, and cosmetics. These terminal consumers are the non-human sinks of a system that produces far more agricultural output than human mouths alone can absorb — and their demands shape what farmers grow and how much of it.

What It Is

Industrial consumption encompasses the non-human, non-direct-food uses of agricultural outputs: biofuels (primarily ethanol and biodiesel), animal feed for companion animals and industrial livestock, bioplastics and biochemicals derived from agricultural starches and oils, and industrial lubricants and cosmetics made from rendered fats. These markets are not secondary or marginal — they collectively consume a significant fraction of US agricultural production and provide price floors that affect what every farmer in the country grows.

How It Works

The major non-human agricultural markets each absorb different commodity streams, operate under different demand drivers, and carry different risks to the broader food system.

Ethanol is the largest single industrial consumer of agricultural output. The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a congressional mandate first enacted under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, requires that a specific volume of renewable fuel be blended into the US gasoline supply each year. The practical result: approximately 40% of the US corn crop is converted into ethanol and blended at 10% or 15% ratios (E10/E15) into virtually all retail gasoline (USDA ERS). Drivers consuming this fuel are, in effect, unwitting and non-consenting participants in an agricultural subsidy program.

Pet food is a $65.8 billion market — a figure that reached this level in 2024, up from $51.7 billion just two years earlier — that functions as one of agriculture’s most valuable waste-disposal mechanisms (American Pet Products Association, 2024). The pet food industry purchases rendered animal byproducts — organ meats, bone meal, blood meal, and trim that human food standards reject — and grain fractions that fail human cosmetic or nutritional standards. It converts these disposal-cost inputs into premium-priced products. This is one of the more genuinely closed-loop behaviors in the agricultural system. However, the “humanization” trend in pet food — premium, human-grade, grain-free, novel-protein products — is now redirecting prime muscle meat away from human consumption into pet bowls, inverting the original waste-management logic.

Bioplastics derived from corn starch (PLA, or Polylactic Acid) and other agricultural starches represent a growing but not yet substantial market. PLA is compostable — under industrial composting conditions, at temperatures above 140°F sustained for weeks. In a standard municipal trash stream, a compost pile, or the ocean, it behaves approximately like petroleum plastic. The marketing exceeds the infrastructure.

Industrial chemicals, lubricants, and cosmetics derived from agricultural fats and oils (soy-based hydraulic fluid, tallow-based emulsifiers, oleic acid from sunflower in personal care products) represent high-margin, low-volume markets that provide important price supports for specific commodities.

Why It Matters

The food vs. fuel debate is not academic. Diverting roughly 40% of the US corn crop to combustion engines (USDA ERS) artificially elevates global corn prices, affecting the cost of feed for livestock in every country that imports US grain. The RFS was enacted in an era of rising oil prices and national security concerns; in an era of accelerating EV adoption, domestic demand for liquid ethanol will decline structurally regardless of the mandate. The agricultural sector has no prepared response to the loss of this demand floor.

The EV transition is an existential question for corn ethanol. If E10 blending requirements remain while gasoline consumption falls 30–50% over the next two decades, the corn market loses its largest single buyer. Efforts to pivot the ethanol industry to Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) are underway but face significant scaling and certification hurdles.

What’s Being Done

The problems described above — ethanol demand eroding under EV pressure, premium pet food competing with human protein supply, compostable plastics ending up in landfills — are real and structural. But several of the most stubborn of these challenges now have commercially proven responses, not just research proposals.

Efforts Showing Results

LanzaJet Freedom Pines Fuels — Ethanol-to-Jet SAF. LanzaJet’s facility in Soperton, Georgia opened in late 2024 as the world’s first commercial-scale plant converting corn ethanol directly into sustainable aviation fuel (up to 9 million gallons/year). The Alcohol-to-Jet technology was 15 years in development and achieves up to 89% carbon intensity reduction with carbon capture and renewable energy inputs, according to Argonne GREET modeling. This is a genuine proof of concept at commercial scale — not a pilot — and LanzaJet licenses its technology to existing ethanol facilities. The challenge is that at 10 million gallons/year, this is a rounding error against the 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol produced annually; replication at scale requires policy support that was partially cut in 2025. (LanzaJet, November 2025)

Bond Pet Foods / Hill’s FDA-Cleared Precision Fermented Protein. Bond Pet Foods (Boulder, CO) uses precision fermentation — inserting animal DNA into yeast — to produce chicken and lamb proteins without raising livestock. In May 2026, Hill’s Pet Nutrition and Bond received the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine’s first-ever No-Objection letter for a precision-fermented animal protein for dog food. A University of Illinois feeding study confirmed the brewed chicken protein is safe and nutritious at up to 40% of dogs’ diets with no adverse markers. This is the regulatory breakthrough the sector needed: a cleared pathway for an ingredient that directly reduces the prime livestock calories flowing into pet food. Production cost and consumer familiarity with “brewed protein” remain the primary barriers to scale. (Bond Pet Foods / Hill’s FDA press release, May 2026)

Rendered Byproduct Upcycling at National Scale. The North American rendering industry — led by Darling Ingredients and the SARIA Group — diverted over 4 million tons of animal byproducts into pet food ingredients in 2024, converting organ meats, bone meal, and fat from human food processing into digestible nutrition. Heat rendering eliminates Salmonella and Listeria. New 2025 organic waste regulations in New York City and Ontario are pushing more food manufacturing byproducts toward rendering, expanding the supply of circular ingredients. This is the most mature circular-economy practice in animal agriculture, and its environmental case is already commercially positive. The remaining vulnerability is aflatoxin in the grain inputs to pet food, not in the rendered ingredients themselves. (NARA 2025 Pet Food Production & Ingredient Analysis)

Black Soldier Fly Insect Protein for Pet Food. AAFCO approved Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) meal for adult dog food in 2021. Insects raised on food waste streams produce high-quality protein with a fraction of the land and water footprint of conventional livestock. The InnovaFeed/ADM joint venture in Decatur, Illinois is scaling US production, and the global insect-based pet food market is projected to grow from $205 million in 2024 to over $4 billion by 2035. The regulatory path is clear; what the sector needs now is retail shelf presence and continued scale-up investment, as InnovaFeed’s Illinois facility experienced an 18-month funding pause that illustrates where the bottlenecks remain. (PRNewswire insect-based pet food market forecast, 2025)

Where More Work Is Needed

No viable transition plan for Corn Belt farmers if ethanol demand collapses. Under high EV adoption scenarios, 400–900 million bushels of corn per year could lose their ethanol market by 2035, driving corn prices to as low as $2.39 per bushel. The SAF pivot can absorb some volume but requires capital-intensive plant retrofitting. No federal program currently provides Corn Belt transition support analogous to the 1990s tobacco buyout that helped farmers shift away from that crop. E15 expansion — the industry’s preferred response — extends the timeline rather than solving the structural problem. Credible early-stage approaches include federal loan guarantees for ethanol-to-SAF retrofits, incentives for converting corn-ethanol acres to high-protein legumes (peas, lentils, dry beans), and expansion of USDA conservation programs to pay farmers for converting marginal acres to cover crops or native prairie.

Industrial composting infrastructure is too sparse to make PLA’s environmental claims real. Only about 12% of US households have municipal organics collection. Without it, PLA packaging ends up in landfills where it degrades anaerobically, potentially releasing more methane than conventional plastic. PLA market growth continues at roughly 12% annually, widening the gap between what is produced and what can actually be composted. Five states are advancing Extended Producer Responsibility laws that begin to force producers to fund the infrastructure their products require — this is the most direct policy lever — but implementation timelines are long and current FTC enforcement against misleading “compostable” claims remains weak. Researchers are also developing enzyme-assisted PLA formulations that degrade at home-compost temperatures, but these remain years from commercial deployment.

Aflatoxin contamination of grain inputs to pet food is a recurring, preventable safety failure. Aflatoxin is produced by Aspergillus mold under drought stress — conditions that climate change is making more frequent in corn-growing regions. The 2020 Sportmix recall accounted for 93% of all pet food pounds recalled from 2020 to 2025 and killed or sickened hundreds of dogs. Real-time testing technology (lateral flow assays, near-infrared spectroscopy) exists and works, but mandatory testing at grain elevator intake and at ethanol byproduct (DDGS) drying points — where aflatoxin can concentrate — is inconsistent and largely self-reported. This is a solvable problem with available tools; it is unsolved because FSMA enforcement has not yet required testing at all critical control points upstream of the pet food manufacturer.

The story of non-human agricultural consumption is a story about where calories flow once they leave the farm — and how much of that flow was designed for a fossil-fuel economy now changing faster than the systems built around it. Forty percent of US corn goes into gasoline engines. A growing share of prime livestock protein goes into premium pet food. Plastic packaging made from corn is labeled compostable even though most of it goes to landfills. These are not isolated failures; they are features of a system optimized for one era, now being stress-tested by the next. The good news is that the stress is producing real innovation, and unlike many agricultural challenges, several solutions here have already passed proof-of-concept. Precision fermentation for pet food cleared its first FDA regulatory hurdle in 2026. Insect protein is AAFCO-approved and commercially advancing. LanzaJet proved at commercial scale that corn ethanol can become jet fuel. The gap between where the solutions are and where the problems are is mostly a gap of investment, policy will, and public awareness — not a gap of scientific possibility. The window for orderly transition is open right now.