I agree regarding grains. They are slow growing and better used for food.

Though frankly, I also believe we use far too much "grain" in our food chain. Monocultural grain farming is brutal to the soil and adds significant heat to the atmosphere through reflection of light. Some studies suggest we could reduce average temperatures in the Midwest by 30% of the increase observed over the last century by converting our grain farms and feed lots, back to traditional farm/ranches using rotational farming technology from the past updated with research. The grazing animals do wonders to enrich the soil and the grasses and other plants help to improve the soil quality.

I am a conservative in the sense I want to "conserve" the planet. I see modern farming technology as industrially efficient but not optimal. I would encourage you to watch the documentary "Kiss the Ground".

Off topic, but I believe people on the left and the right both want to preserve our planet, but somehow everything becomes an ideological battlefield.

Far too much of our grain goes to animal feed. Grain fed meat is tasty, but grass fed, and free-range products have healthier fat. I think humans consume only around 20% of the grain grown in the US. So, our whole biofuel emphasis rather than focus on biofuel has turned into a way to support our grain farmers. It is a case of "dumb and dumber". Now, I will climb down from my soapbox.

The beauty of algae for biofuels is how much faster it grows and that it can use human and animal wastewater as water and fertilizer. It can be grown in multi-story buildings in the middle of nowhere in land not suited for anything else. While flat ground farming is common, I see future algae farms more likely to be vertical story farms filled with tubes full of algae (to keep the smell of the wastewater from stinking up the area) . Check the photo below. The algae could grow 24 hours a day using artificial light from solar panels on the roof of the building. Adjacent to the solar "farms" would be small biodiesel refineries that convert the algae sludge into oil, that "oil" could be sent to large more sophisticated refineries for further refining into carbon fuel products.

Where I think "grain" figures into the future outside of food is in the production of cellulose based biodegradable plastics. A friend of mine is a researcher in Canada, and someday Canada could become one of the largest producers of biodegradable plastic. See link below. I am old, so I most likely won't live to see the wonders of man's ingenuity applied to the challenges of producing energy and other products from plants instead of "fossil fuels", but rather than condemn "fossil fuels", we may come to the point, where we store the excess carbon fuels back into the ground where we extracted fossil fuels in the past.

Once you start down the rabbit hole of what is possible, you begin to wonder why our politicians are so focused at creating strife rather than investing in solutions. I have no doubt that private industry will spend all the money needed to make these products available once they are commercially viable. So, government should put their efforts into figuring out the technology to make them commercially viable (it might even make a few dollars licensing that technology and reduce our tax burden, but that might be expecting too much).

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-switchgrass-bioplastics.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.0c75d72b11d8c2179b85022b041d22cb?rik=sku3lF8VrOQ6dg&riu=http%3a%2f%2fs3.amazonaws.com%2fdigitaltrends-uploads-prod%2f2017%2f02%2fbiofuel_algae.jpg&ehk=u8kfrS76qkW6%2f5Q7Yc%2b8E3lF9YKWTfeTz0Us6L99cSo%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0