You got ripped, the gold standard here for excellant sweetcorn is $4/dozen. Handpicked that morning, you won't find any better (making me hungary now
) Sweetcorn is not what ethonal is made if, it is a different variety.
White corn (what torteillas are made of, different variety yet) has been constantly more irritating for farmers to grow. They are really cracking down on any yellow kernals that didn't get vacuumed out of the combine and you get a harsh dock on your price. One guy last year really got screwed because the co-op uses its fertilizer wagons to shuttle yellow corn around in the off season, more than a couple kernels where still in the wagon when they came out to spread fertillizer on his field that spring and they grew. Lots of guys are saying "screw it" when it comes to white corn. It pays better than yellow but not enough anymore, it wouldn't surprise me if it didn't start going up in price, I suppose since most of that kind of thing is just corn flour and water they are pretty cheap to make anyway.
Field corn (what most of "corn" in the world is) is selling for stupid high prices because of the govt keeping it in ethonal production. Corn will the primary source of ethonal as long as its lobbys keep it there.
15 years ago it was selling for something like $1.50/bushel and farmers were going broke left and right, now it is somewhere around $6-7 a bushel and they are happy to start finally upgrading their 30-50 year old equipment.
The high corn price drives the price of many things up, from the beef that also eats it to the hay it competes with for land (which also drives up the price of beef), dairy products, pork, poultry... everything depends on it and will react to its price. Lots of hayground and pasture has been switched in the past couple years to corn. A drought like last year doesn't help anything either, hay is really high priced because it did terrible in the dry weather, good round bales are getting over $200 at auction where $75-100 was the norm a year ago (and as a result we have the smallest national cattle herds decades)
I ain't gonna complain that my customers have more money to spend or that the 7 acres I am going to plant this year will hopefully be a profitable little side venture.
As far as E15 goes, I saw in one of my small engine dealer mags that a bunch of brands had tried to appeal it and got shot down. Apparently while the EPA cares about what the permiation levels of their fuel lines are they are not a big enough player to take into consideration if their stuff will actually run and/or last on it.