Posted on 10/25/2009 7:10:51 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Biofuel refineries in the US have set fresh records for grain use every month since May. Almost a third of the US corn harvest will be diverted into ethanol for motors this year, or 12pc of the global crop.
The world's grain stocks have dropped from four to 2.6 months cover since 2000, despite two bumper harvests in North America. China's inventories are at a 30-year low. Asian rice stocks are near danger level.
Yet farm commodities have largely missed out on Bernanke's reflation rally in metals, oil, and everything else. Dylan Grice from Société Générale sees "bargain basement" prices.
Wheat has crashed 70pc from early 2008. Corn has halved. The "Ags" have mostly drifted sideways over the last six months. This divergence within the commodity family is untenable, given the bio-ethanol linkage to oil.
For investors wishing to rotate out of overstretched rallies – Wall Street's Transport index and the Russell 2000 broke down last week – this is a rare chance to buy cheap into a story that will dominate the rest of our lives.
Barack Obama has not reversed the Bush policy on biofuels, despite food riots in a string of poor countries last year and calls for a moratorium. The subsidy of 45 cents per gallon remains.
The motive is strategic. America is weaning itself off imported energy at breakneck speed. It will not again be held hostage by oil demagogues, or humiliated by states that cannot feed themselves. Those Beijing students who laughed at US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may not enjoy the last laugh. The US is the agricultural superpower. Foes will discover why that matters.
The world population is adding "another Britain" every year. This will continue until mid-century. By then we will have an extra 2.4bn mouths to feed.
China and Southeast Asia
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I guess it is deflation today. Tomorrow it will be inflation.
Dr. Malthus, please call your office ...
This is truly insane!
well it solves obesity problem
“....America is weaning itself off imported energy at breakneck speed. It will not again be held hostage by oil demagogues, or humiliated by states that cannot feed themselves....”
Really????
It it gets bad enough people will turn on the Ecology freaks and profiteers that are behind this.
POT was recently downgraded (the company Potash, not the commodity). Agrium (AGU) also warned investors that earnings will drop significantly this quarter.
That idiot should visit a grocery store here and look at prices before he writes such lies!
It’s absolutely unimaginable that POT was set to earn nearly $16 a share about 1.5 years ago...and yet, it was....on its way to over $20. This was roughly coincident with crude oil’s equally amazing rise to $147.
Natural gas?
yitbos
That's what you get when you let the inmates run the asylum.
"The world population is adding "another Britain" every year. This will continue until mid-century. By then we will have an extra 2.4bn mouths to feed.
China and Southeast Asia are switching to animal-protein diets as they grow wealthy, as the Koreans did before them. It takes roughly 3-5kgs of animal feed from grains to produce 1kg of meat."
yitbos
I recall those days not long ago. One master of the universe at GS was expecting oil to reach 200. Perhaps corn kernels were ready to move from bushel pricing to carat pricing.
AEP didnn't say food was cheap. He said it won't ever be cheaper, ie. prices will only go up.
yitbos
Yeah, I went “huh?” at that one, too.
Looks more to me like the Dem strategy for reducing our oil dependency is crashing the economy so there is no one using any energy.
So much for a right to eat. The greenie meanie weenies insist that food must be used for industial energy, not personal human energy.
You are trying to reason with facts. That seems to be a lost cause...
Starting January 1st 2010, Oregonians will be able to buy premium non ethanol contaminated gasoline for their vehicles and choose to no longer participate in the ethanol fraud.
If we really wanted to be energy independent we would be expanding oil drilling and pursuing nuclear power. This whole corn ethanol business is crazy. It’s barely break even in terms of net energy produced.
As for food production, the article says population growth trends will require a 77% increase in global agricultural production to sustain. That’s a lot. Maybe we should be cheering global warming on rather than trying to stop it since it would result in longer growing seasons. Historically warmer periods have been much better for human populations.
REAL cheap in comparison to what it will be in 20yrs.
Not really. It isn’t a zero sum game. The starch or sugars in the corn are converted to ethanol. What remains is protein and the rest of the plant matter.
These are then sold yet again, as Distillers Dried Grains, or DDGs. 150 bucks a ton, or whatever. Fed to hogs, cattle, etc. In no way does 1/3 of the corn crop get diverted. Right now the harvest is underway, one of the largest, and best crops ever. But heavy and frequent rains are making it difficult.
research the subject....yes, alot of bu’s of corn are processed thru ethanol plants....but the ddg’s (dry distillers grain) is then sold to lvsk industry for feed as a by-product of ethanol produciton....the ddgs’, which are full of starch are excellent for Lvsk feed.
Granted Ethanol, like wind & solar power are really inefficeint sources of energy, ethanol, unlike the other 2, can at least, at minimum be mathmatically breakeven at worst.
“....America is weaning itself off imported energy at breakneck speed. It will not again be held hostage by oil demagogues,”
Bullshit
If we did not use corn to make hundreds of products like pharmaceuticals, plastics, industrial chemicals, and fuels, we would have to put at least 10 million acres of corn ground back into federal subsidy, to not farm it, at a cost of billions of dollars a year to taxpayers.
Corn is a raw material for many uses, only one of which happens to be food.
American farmers can double the production of corn anytime we have the markets or sell it.
Yep, really.
Archer Daniels Midland - “we demands our [corporate welfare] rights”!
In fact companies like British Petroleum, Exxon, and Cosmo Oil from Japan are investing billions world wide in bio technologies.
This is a great flowering of the free enterprise system world wide.
Iowa Bioprocessing center just down the road from me cost a billion and a half to build, and provides a market for a semi load of Iowa corn every two and a half minutes. 2,400 people have good, often highly paid technical jobs there. They make dozens of products; various food ingredients, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals, plastics, industrial chemicals and fuels.
The new green algae fuel production facility Cosmo Oil of Japan is building in Papua, New Guinea will also cost nearly two billion dollars, and provide work for thousands.
A green algae co-product of fuel is cheap high protein algae cake for human food ingredients and animal feeds, and this facility should produce millions of tons of it. It will compete directly with corn and soybean meal.
This plant alone will increase the global availability of cheap protein and meat very substantially.
As green algae production ramps up, there will be hundreds of such plants built world wide.
Farm commodity prices go up and go down. Always have, always will.
Farm prices have little to do with supermarket prices.
Yes supermarket prices will mostly go up. It is farm prices that are so volatile and hard to predict and can drop like a rock.
Corn and soybeans have a major new competitor coming over the horizon; green algae cake. After removing the oil it makes a high protein food and feed supplement.
As green algae fuel production ramps up, the cake will be available by the shipload, millions of tons in fact, and will compete directly with corn and soybeans for the high protein supplement food and livestock feed markets.
The excess algae cake can and will also be made into many other pharmaceutical, plastics, industrial chemicals and even more fuel, just as corn is today. The determining factor will be the markets for the various products.
By what article of the Constitution or Biblical Commandment does it say corn can only be used for food?
In fact corn has been used for many different products for years and the list just keeps on growing.
We grow enough corn for all the many uses, and as new uses and markets are developed, we will keep on increasing our corn crop, which we can double anytime we have the markets to do so.
In fact that would save billions of dollars of subsidies now being paid to farmers to not farm 30 million acres. This is to keep farm prices from collapsing and our farmers going bankrupt.
You are right on about global warming. A warmer climate and more CO2 would produce a time of milk and honey.
You are also correct about our need to drill our own oil and nuclear power.
Something you might not be aware of is that we can quickly double our corn crop, if we had the markets to sell it.
That old business about ethanol not being energy efficient is long outdated, if it ever was true. You also have to count the many corn co-products of fuel, which the negative figures typically ignore. Check out the product list of this corn processing center near me:
Billions of dollars of investment world wide in green algae fuel will yield millions of tons of cheap high protein green algae cake that can be blended into foods like soups, breads and cakes. It also will compete directly with corn and soybean meal for livestock feed.
If cheap high protein green algae cake takes away too much market share from corn and soybeans, we may be forced to retire more farm land, under billions of dollars in federal subsidy again, to limit our corn and soybean production even more, to keep from crashing the markets with over production.
Evans-Pritchard says the U.S.A. is such a breadbasket that it burns food for fuel. Strategically, this ag capability will be more important than oil.
yitbos
They are sure not making any new farmland are they?
Yes, I believe you are correct, that farm land, indeed any land, will skyrocket in price in 20 years.
There is nothing in the Constitution or the Bible that declares corn can only be used for food.
Corn is a raw product with hundreds of uses.
In fact, corn and soybeans are both going to be challenged in the commodities marketplace by cheap high protein green algae cake, as billions of dollars are being poured into world wide green algae fuel production.
High protein green algae cake is a co-product of the oil in green algae that is used for fuel.
As the algae production ramps up, the world will have a vast new supply of cheap protein to blend into people foods. By feeding livestock the high protein green algae cake supplement in their diets, we will have lots more cheap meat to fill the new world wide demand for that.
.....SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE !!!
You’ll notice that the folks running around screaming like their hair is on fire about how corn is processed tend to know nothing about corn (or processing or livestock husbandry) in the first place.
It’s idiotic to burn our food in our vehicles and (our banks-making up for inflated prices because of it), rather than in our bodies.
The only “food” you’re being deprived of when ethanol is processed from corn is starch. Does anyone honestly think that Americans are getting too little high fructose corn syrup in their diets?
No, but that does increase the cost of food (do you know how much corn/starch/corn syrup is USED in everyday foods)?
I am sorry, I don’t like to pay extra for some green experiement (which doesn’t even clean up the environment, btw, and is LESS efficient than overall gassoline).
Corn is two Dollars a bushel cheaper than at the same time last year.
Still a stupid experiment (if the market were to dictate our fuel-fine), but when the GOVERNMENT madates we use such fuel as has been done by through subsidies (and mandate of at least 10% ethanol) then I am against this!
My favorite one is, US corn subsidies and ethanol production have destroyed Mexico’s corn production.
116 new people per minute.?? Markets opening every day;^)
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