Need for fuel and materials transforming Ohio agriculture

Columbus — Globalization has hurt some of Ohio’s former industrial giants, created new high-tech industries and now is changing the state’s largest industry: agriculture.

Understanding those global forces — the demand for food, biofuel and bio-based chemical feedstock — is the focus of a three-day conference hosted here by Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center of Wooster.

The conference is the 20th annual meeting of the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council, which is meeting simultaneously at a downtown hotel with the biennial Polymer Summit of the state’s polymer industries, represented by Polymer Ohio Inc.

The issues range from the ethics of turning half of the nation’s corn output into ethanol motor fuel to the urgent need to move the chemical and transportation industries away from petroleum and its ever-increasing costs to sustainable agriculture products as the raw material for everything from fuel to plastic and fabric.

Cleveland Plain Dealer