Posted on 02/02/2007 4:34:02 PM PST by blam
I'm talking about the cost per acre {not mentioned in this artical}. It doesn't make sense to plant something that will cost you more to grow than you will make when you sell.
That's why people have been grinding corn for 75,000 years
They put a lot of other things in those tortillas, tacos or tostadas. Beans, tomatoes, cheese, meat, chicken, peppers, onions, lettuce, anything you desire to put in them. It's a basic building block like two slices of bread are to us. Tastier, too.
I guess they should stop exporting drugs to our country and figure out a way to plant more corn.
Good...if Fritos are $5/bag, there won't be so many fat people.
I didn't think it was a lot of food or a little food. I was surprised that the tortilla was such a backbone of an entire food ecosystem. With one item as the mainstay, it can be devastating for that one item to go up in price.
I guess the subsidies for NOT planting corn will have to cease.
We are blessed with the best farmland in the world. We can grow the corn.
I should have added that this kilo of tortillas represents 40% of the protein consumed in a day. Switching this for cheap ramen noodles can't be a good thing
Very doubtful. Farmers have taken much acreage out of production over the past decades due to low corn prices. That land will go back into production before any is "consumed by farming".
I'm all in favor of developing any and all new sources of energy and making more use of "old" ones, especially nuclear. But making bullshit arguments against ethanol isn't going to win you kneejerk naysayers any points
Let the envirowackos put their money where their mouth is and fund ethanol without my tax dollars.
For the same reason the government should subsidize the oil industry: because eventually research may wean us off a crippling dependency on finite resources.
Let the envirowackos put their money where their mouth is and fund ethanol without my tax dollars.
You'd rather your tax dollars go to fund Osama bin Laden? The House of Saud? Prince Bandar's gold-plated outhouse?
I doubt many of the farmers in the Midwest consider themselves "envirowackos." Nor do I think they would meet that description in any but the most "liberal" interpretation of the term.
OK, since it is pretty obvious that most people here aren't farmers, aren't aware of farm issues, I'll repeat the salient facts again that I've stated on other threads where ethanol and corn prices come up.
1. First, let's look at the quoted source for this article, Lester Brown, shall we?
http://www.earth-policy.org/About/Lester_bio.htm
I thought this was Free Republic, not the Sierra Club. But hey, if you folks want to hang your hats on the peg set out by malthusian environmentalists, y'all go right ahead.
2. Corn yields have gone up year after year for the last five decades. Don't believe me? Well, here's a nifty graph of the last three decades, which shows most of the upward pressure in corn yields:
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.asp
3. What was the price of corn in August, 1973? Less than $3/bu - like $2,79 or so. What is the price of corn that has everyone up in arms today? Just over $4/bu.
How much would a bushel of corn be if the value of that bushel of corn had kept up with monetary inflation?
Over $13/bushel. Got that? To bring corn back into line with the value that farmers got per bushel in 1973, you'd have to quadruple corn prices from last year. All we've seen is an increase to $4/bu. Don't get me wrong -- farmers are rather happy about this rise. It sure is better than a couple years ago, when corn went down to about $1.87/bu after Katrina.
All these people who are blovating about the price of corn need to know something: we've been literally awash in corn for the last 20+ years. We've had huge carry-over from year to year. Finally, farmers decided that there was this ethanol thing that could use up corn. So the farmers decided that since no one else was willing to find a home for the excess corn, the ethanol boom would do just fine.
Now, hedge funds and commodity speculators are thinking that all the excess corn is going to dry up, and so they're bidding up the price of corn. Farmers have nothing to do with the price. Farmers are stating an intention to plant 10% more corn acres, and still the price of near futures is going up. Why is that?
Well, farmers have just as much to do with setting the price of corn as an oil driller has to do with setting the price of crude. They're both commodities, traded on the Chicago and NY exchanges, respectively. Anyone can buy a futures contract. Anyone -- you don't have to be a farmer or oilman to get into the futures market. All you need is 10% of the value of the futures contract and an account an you can buy a traincar of corn or oil. If enough people with 10% of the value of the futures contracts want to buy futures, guess what?
The price of the underlying commodity goes up.
What happens if the actual, physical market is awash with the real commodity, ie, the real stuff, in the face of high futures prices?
Well, for an answer to that, look at crude and natural gas futures this past July to August. The fundamentals finally overwhelmed the speculators and the price of oil and natural gas came crashing down, taking down at least one hedge fund (Amaranth) in the process.
4. Conservatives love to point at ag subsidies and complain about farming socialism. OK, well, that's consistent with conservative economic philosophy. What would help get rid of the subsidies is for there to be a sustainable, high-enough price of commodities for farmers to make enough to support their operations without subsidies. Guess what? At $4/bu corn and $60/bbl oil, we're talking just a bit above break-even for some very low-cost producers. We're still not in a great price range for many other producers. $5/bu as a floor price would make many more farm operations more solid and able to swear off subsidies. Remember, the inflation-adjusted value of corn in pre-oil inflation days is over $13/bu. Are you willing to give farmers a price for this commodity that allows them to go back to being able to keep up with the inflation in their input costs and support a family on 400 acres instead of 5,000? I'm guessing from what I'm reading here, the answer is 'no'.
Oil prices are inflating. Wages have inflated since 1973. Land prices, equipment prices, fertilizer prices, etc have all gone up since 1973.
Sooner or later, you have to expect the corn producers to say "Let's find a way of getting rid of this corn and get prices back up to where we can live on them..." and with ethanol, they've done just that.
Prices go up just a teenie-weenie bit towards the 1973 value of a bushel or corn and already the public, 98% of whom know almost nothing about farming or farm economics, are starting to gripe about the increase in food and ag commodity prices.
Which means that since consumers don't want to pay a fair price for commodities that is keeping up (even marginally) with inflation, that you consumers like subsidies.
You can have either subsidies or much higher commodity prices. You won't get rid of the former without agreeing to the latter.
That study fails to account for uses of the residual byproducts.
On the other hand, if we can begin using cornstalks (not corn kernals) to produce the ethanol, the process will not compete with food demands.
Currently the cornstalks are NOT used to make ethanol.
SO, it's not like we can't grow MORE corn. There is plenty of arable land in the US, and our yields have gotten better each year. There is plenty of land to grow corn, as well as any other crop we might need.
Corn previously grown had little lysine ~ a protein.
What happens? A lot of us are Screwed.
Cattle feedlots have become dependent upon cheap corn, true.
But cattle are versatile critters. You can feed them the "mash" that results from ethanol production, which is called "distiller's grain" and comes from the ethanol plant in either "wet" or "dry" form.
Among ag people, you'll see the most common variant, dried distiller's grains abbreviated as "DDG" and it works fine as animal feed. It needs a little bit of augmentation in cattle diets, but it isn't as tho the corn is "gone" from the cattle feedlot. It is just being passed through an ethanol plant first.
The most profitable ethanol plants have a feedlot nearby to take the distillers grains in wet form.
Sorry, I meant to include this URL:
http://www.ianrpubs.unl.edu/epublic/pages/publicationD.jsp?publicationId=669
Please read the summaries where they did side-by-side comparisons of whole or rolled corn in cattle diets vs. distillers grains. You'll see in some cases, the cattle do better on distillers grains.
So, as you can see, several years ago, farmers and feedlot nutritionists were answering the questions of "what will happen when a lot of corn is shunted off into ethanol production?"
The questions have already been asked. And answered.
Lester Brown, you see, is located in Washington DC, where, last I looked, there's darn little farming happening. You'll notice that the URL I cited above came out of Nebraska, where folks actually depend for their living on corn and cattle instead of on grant money from foundations.
Think of all the tortillas that would make.
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