Steve Sinning comes from a long line of farmers.

His father was a farmer. His grandfather was a farmer. Even his great-grandfather was a farmer.

“I’ve been farming since the mid-’70s,” Sinning said. “But it’s really been all my life. I grew up on a farm—the same farm I’m on today. Dad grew up here, too. I’m a fourth-generation farmer, and my son will be the fifth.”

For decades, Sinning’s family has played a vital role in putting food on America’s table. But today, they’re helping meet America’s energy needs, too.

“Almost all my corn these days goes to the POET ethanol plant,” Sinning said. “We need to do everything we can to save our climate and promote agriculture, and the best way to do that is through bioethanol.”

Bioethanol is a biofuel—a clean-burning, renewable alternative to fossil fuel—and its benefits are tremendous. Sinning said that being able to pump more gallons of affordable, higher-octane fuel made from American-grown corn is a benefit that can’t be beat.

But what many people don’t realize is that the environmental benefits of biofuels extend far beyond the pump.

That’s the message behind a short documentary-style film produced for POET by BBC StoryWorks, the commercial content division of BBC Global News, and presented by the International Council of Biotechnology Associations as part of its Nature’s Building Blocks series. Sinning is featured in the film, along with Bill Gibbons, the Associate Dean for Research at South Dakota State University’s College of Agriculture, and Jeff Broin, Founder and CEO of POET.

The Nature’s Building Blocks series explores the ways in which biotechnology is helping to heal, fuel and feed the world and promotes public understanding of the continued innovation in the human health, agriculture, industrial and environmental sectors while examining the role of biotechnology in solving some of the world’s greatest environmental and health challenges.

“The short, documentary-style commercial films for Nature’s Building Blocks are solutions-focused,” said Gemma Jennings, Head of Global Partnerships for Programme Partnerships BBC StoryWorks. “It starts by contextualizing the problem, or need for a solution, before exploring how that solution works and who could benefit. Within this storytelling approach, it’s important that the challenges and limitations are presented, and the scale of the solution considered. At the center of each film is an interesting human story that would be engaging to audiences and shine a light on new technologies.”

Biofuels, POET’s film explains, are a real catalyst for sustainable agriculture, and the biofuels industry is also an outlet through which agriculture is helping to solve global problems like climate change. Simply put, POET’s philosophy is that everything you can get from a barrel of oil you can get from a bushel of corn—it’s simply a matter of biotechnology and economics.

“Think of a cornstalk,” Broin said. “The leaves act as the solar panel, and energy is transferred from the sun into the corn kernels and the biomass, which can be stored indefinitely—so they become nature’s battery.”