This is where environmentalists always say that the consumer should pay more in the supermarkets, ignoring the fact that the supermarkets make the highest margins in the entire chain between seed and consumer. And they have no incentive to pay farmers more, because farmers don't have a lot of places where they can sell their products.
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
Simple: Make better practices required by law, so that all farmers have to do it. Add some tariffs so that foreign farmers can't compete by ignoring these practices.
Food production is a greater societal need and a lot of corn goes into making ethanol for cars to burn instead of food.
We don't have to outlaw ICE cars to make it more expensive to drive them, we just have to make corn ethanol more expensive for gas companies to cut their fuel with, and food corn cheaper for humans.
Also: We need to grow less corn overall. We make way, way more of it than we need and not enough of other better veg.
Corn is a poor ethanol crop. Period. It should not ever be used for its ethanol purpose. There are better crops suited for that purpose but the infrastructure in the US is set up for.....corn. Humans don't eat corn (or they eat a trivial percentage). 75% of the corn grown goes to feed animals (usually cattle) or cars (via ethanol).
Yea we need to grow less corn. But we can't outlaw it. You just removed the livelihood for the Midwest. The current economic incentive structure is to grow corn (there literally is no downside). A solution that changes that has to include benefits for farmers, landowners, consumers, and society. It's not going to be easy (or cheap).
It's not just an economic incentive structure though: It's subsidies that make it a priority crop instead of anything else.
We could be making so many other things instead. A tax on ethanol & cattle feed would do more to shift things than making it illegal. Make it cheap to grow for humans, but allow other forms of food crop to have a fighting chance.
Biofuels are a gigantic waste. At some point I did the math for Germany. If we took the land used for energy crops and instead covered it with solar panels, that would produce enough energy to basically cover Germany's energy needs (or a least a large part of them, depending on eg storage efficiencies).
No. F that. Consumers aren't paying externalities for transportation costs (think airlines and cars). Why should agriculture be the bad guy? Start with transportation and then come after ag.
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.