Maggie's Farm

Poor people don't eat Field Corn. Not very much, anyway. A special prize to any Maggies Farm Reader who can eat a pound ($0.11 worth) of Field Corn this week. The prize is a trip to a gastroenterologist.

Poor Cattle eat field corn. Right before they're slaughtered as food for RICH PEOPLE!

If poor people were starving due to the lack of the cheapest stuff on earth in their diet maybe we should QUIT PAYING FARMERS NOT TO RAISE THE STUFF! We currently pay farmers NOT to farm over 34 Million Acres.

NEVER trust the conclusions of a perfessor who can't get the basic facts right. To Wit:


“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol,” Mr. Senauer, also an applied economics professor at Minnesota, said. “It’s not going to be a very good diet but that’s roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.”

We use 60% of the cattle feeding ability of a bushel (56lbs) of cattle feed to produce, roughly, 3 gallons of ethanol. If you do the math this comes out to about 11.2 lbs of field corn per gallon.

We expend about 30,000 btus of energy (mostly nat gas) in the process, and avoid Importing 116,000 BTUs from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, or some such.

We keep the money at home. The production provides jobs Here, and and the taxes go to build schools, and highways in the United States, not Algeria, or Equador.

And, most important, if ANYONE can find a connection between U.S. #2 Dent Field Corn, and Asian Long-Stemmed Rice grown in the Rice Paddies of China, and Vietnam I'll eat the entire rice crop of Cambodia singlehandedly. And throw in Afghanistan, and India for good measure.

The markets are "reeling," alright. Wheat is down from it's highs by about 40%, soybeans by about 15%.

And, the real price of corn is somewhere South of 10 cents/lb. We don't know exactly how far south because there's so much, actual, real corn in storage that the elevators aren't interested in buying any right now. AT ANY PRICE. All they'll say is "call us back in August."

The cost of food, according to the CPI, was up two tenths of one percent (0.2%) in March.

NOW, since the cost of food was only up 0.2% in the U.S., and we have NO export tariffs on food, why is food more expensive in, say, India? Could it be because they have HUGE IMPORT, AND "EXPORT" TARIFFS ON FOOD?!?

Dear perfesser Runge is a professor of "LAW!" (anyone smell "lobbyist?") Here:

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=116098

is what an Expert has to say.

BTW, our Corn Exports were UP 16% this year. Soybeans, about 12%, I believe.

However, the European Union held 10% of THEIR Wheat land out of production. Maybe we should pick on them awhile, ya think?

I kinda doubt it, Bud.

With Unleaded at $3.65/gallon, and E85, in some places, at $2.65/gallon

the oil companies can sponsor all of these silly sound bytes they want; the future will keep on coming on.

An article in the WSJ (I'm no fan of that anti-ethanol, Exxon-sponsored rag; but there you go) postulated that the 550,000 barrels of ethanol we use daily are holding the price of gasoline down by, probably, $0.50/gallon.

NOW, One more time, ask a working man, trying to feed a family on a modest income, which is more important to him:

Saving $0.02 on a can of coca cola (that's how much the price of the corn in a coke has gone up,) saving you $0.15 on your Ribeye Steak, or SAVING $600.00/Yr on fuel for his vehicles.

Texas? . . . . Texas . . . hmm

I've heard that name before . . . now, where was it?

Oh, wait! . . . . . . . Oil?

Naw, THAT can't be it.

Never mind.

Buddy,

I think sometime in the future Brazilian Cane Ethanol will be very important for us, and the world. It IS a pretty efficient process, and they do have SCADS, AND SCADS of fallow, arable land.

That said, however, there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. It's very labor intensive (at present;) and they, literally, pay their labor "slave" wages. I would say that a modern, state-of-the-art American Corn Ethanol Refinery such as are being designed, and built, now, will be just as efficient, if not more so, than a Cane Mill once you factor in the labor of the Brazilian refinery.

Another thing: It IS S. America. The "Politics" down there are "volatile," to say the least. Do we really, at this stage, want to transfer our dependency from Riyadh, to Rio?

That said, though, we will drop the tariff on Ethanol when we drop the $0.51 tax credit on same. (btw, all this needs to be taken with a small amount of salt, anyway; we let the first 500 Million gallons, or so, in TARIFF-FREE, now. Sometimes Brazil doesn't even reach That goal. for what it's worth)

If we dropped the tariff before we dropped the tax credit the taxpayers could find themselve Subsidizing Foreign Ethanol to the Detriment of our own oil producers.

Anyway, we're at the end as far as building any more corn ethanol plants. Those under constructiion will bring us up to about 15 Billion gallon/yr - the limit for corn.

We Really need the tariff, right now, to protect/encourage investment in "Cellulosic." If we're going to survive "Peak Oil" we will HAVE TO HAVE a Lot of This. Give us a couple of years.

BTW, a lot of what you're reading is just nonsense sponsored by a Big Oil Industry that is astonished by what they're seeing in biofuels. The words "Panic," and "Hysteria" come to mind.

You can betcha it's Lot more margin than the Oil Companies, and Sauds want to give up, Buddy. Too freakin bad.

On another note: The ethanol refineries are getting a lot more efficient:

http://www.ethanolrfa.org/objects/documents/1652/2007_analysis_of_the_efficiency_of_the_us_ethanol_industry.pdf

Of course, the ones coming online in the next few years will make these look like the Model T's they are.

There ya go! Tar Sands! The Quick, Clean, Economical Solution.

Why din't I think of THAT?

Ethanol ain't going anywhere, Bud. Quite simply, the Farm State Senators are too Numerous for that. Exxon, and Conoco are just fighting a rear-guard action while they try to figure out what to do next.

As for the "Food" deal: it's already becoming "Yesterday's Story." What problem there is is Rice; and that's a function of who consumes it, and, obviously, where it's grown. You can't get anyone to stay serious for long when you're talking about food "crisis" in Egypt, Hayti, Zimbabwe, and India. There Ag/Economic Policies are Horrid; and everyone knows it.

You're dead when late night talkshow hosts start making fun of you; and, they're having a ball with Costco limiting people to 4 fifty pound bags of rice per trip. 4 - 50 Pound Bags!

Ah, BD, you could handle a nuke-powered chain saw. :)

Seriously, I'm all for Nukes. It'll take a while to gett'em up and running; but we'll need'em for the long run. In the meantime, ten or fifteen percent corn in that chainsaw will make her run like a top.

Fantastic, Bud; I knew you'd stumble onto my secret soul, Eventually.