Posted on 05/31/2011 1:44:23 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’ve said it before here - no one who ran for President in 2008 should be considered in 2012. Rudy, Romney, Huckabee, McCain....none of them reflect the pulse of the Republican party.
There’s one more difference that never gets mentioned. Sweet corn, the kind I eat, is much more valuable as cob or kernel table corn than field corn, the kind that gets fed to cows or to distilleries. No corn farmer in his right mind is going to ship sweet corn to an ethanol plant unless maybe he grew a bad crop. But there’s a limit to how much corn people can eat. The case cannot be made that sweet corn has been taken out of production to feed either cows or ethanol plants——other grains, such as soft wheat maybe but not sweet corn. If subsidies are allowing field corn to push out food grains then the numbers have gotten out of balance and the subsidies need to wind down. High priced crude oil back in the 1973 oil embargo pushed gasoline very close to the production cost of ethanol/methanol and that’s when the Saudis folded their tent——I wrote about this then and nothing has changed but the numbers.
Ethanol and other subsidies must be on the table.
Fair question you asked.
Almost all of the price increases you’re seeing at the store are a result of increased energy costs, everything from diesel fuel to electricity. Remember, even just preparing the field to plant a crop requires a lot of diesel fuel.
AND nearly all of those increases can be laid at the feet of the eco-nazis.
From your link:
“
Producing enough ethanol to replace America’s imported oil alone would require putting nearly 900 million acres under cultivation—or roughly 95 percent of the active farmland in the country.”
At 450 gal per acre, that would be over 21 million barrels a day. We import about 14 million barrels a day.
Sad but true, and it's how the leftist environmentalists (communists) manage the ignorant slickers.
Just find a Snail Darter or a food chain Minnow and, bingo, the commies can pit the Salmon Sushi slickers and fishermen against the farmers and take away the water they have already contracted and paid for. Then, maybe, Ya can raise the price of electricity and they can't run their own pumps (assuming they're allowed to pump their own wells).
Same "environmentalists" that put MTBE into that same water supply as the "new improved" ethanol.
The real bad guys keep popping up as everyone's enemies.
Good farming needs a LOT of water, and it's the best place we can put it.
Indeed, I have. A goodly chunk of my OSU Master Gardener training was spent on working farms. It was required. And you’re right, it’s quite impressive. I singled out corn because, despite all due diligence, science IS science. Corn cannot survive without a good deal of fertilizer, proportionate to many other crops.
But your point about golf courses, for example, is a good one. Something I know a bit about. My dad was a golf course superintentent for a few decades, and they used a TON of fertilizer then. I know they’ve made it more efficient & precise nowadays, but your point still stands as valid. Of course, the heartbreaking decision to flood farmland to relieve the flooding on the Mississippi only makes much of this worse. I shudder to think of the nutritious topsoil that’s been washed away.
The other point I was trying to make was the kneejerk reaction of the bureaucrats....eliminate the measly amounts of phosphorous in our cleaning products!
True, but in many poorer countries, most people don’t even get sweet corn. They eat field corn. Even on the cob. Been there, done that!
A humorous aside: A girl I knew with French relatives told me that they told her “only peasants eat corn on the cob”. (Apparently that family didn’t even know what sweet corn was. Their loss!)
Not an exact answer to the question you posed, but you may find this informative:
In the 39 years from 1970 to 2009 food costs, as measured against the average American family income, fell 30%, from just under 14% of income to 10% of income. And the foods have become more ‘user friendly’ with better packaging and more ready to fix meals and ingredients.
I’m not sure what the last two years have done to that, but we are still a long ways from 1970 food prices.
We don't eat field corn.
Affirmative, I used that to distinguish between field corn and sweet corn that people generally eat, posting before I knew you had a farming background and the correct lexicon.
If you live in Philadelphia, you might have to.
Ethanol subsidy is bizarre. Why would the gummit want to subsidize burning our food in our cars?
No energy subsidies? But..but...that would make a $34,000 5 kilowatt solar panel installation cost $35,000 and I can’t afford that! It means no payback until the panels need replacement!
And my investments in wind turbines depend on hefty tax breaks to remain profitable to me!
(chuckle) a dose of reality!
This shows the difference between a Statesman(women) and a Politician.
Perhaps, but if they hadn’t done it, the losses to cropland elswhere, not to mention the additional losses to homes, businesses and industries, upstream, downstream, and well west into rural S.E. MO, would have been staggering. Check out this map:
http://www.semissourian.com/files/bpnm_floodway_reduced.pdf
(You may have to save that and then open it - for some reason it does not open directly on the computer I am using. But the source is clean - a local newspaper’s website.)
Also, quite near where I live is an area that floods every year there is a significant flood. The only years I can recall it not being farmed was a year when the flooding occurred very late in the (flood) season and we had unusually wet weather (but not river flooding) after that, and a one year when it didn’t flood (rotation year?) Shoot, I’ve seen it planted, crops get a few inches high, then flood, then planted again. (Probably with a different crop?)
I’m pretty much willing to bet that MOST of the area flooded in Missouri will be back into production in a year or two. Not all - in some areas, such as near the point where the levee was blown, surely the faster flow would have damaged the land. And, this is assuming the farmers come back. But, that’s really good land - my guess is that most will.
There was some worry about a “toxic stew” of chemicals from the farms damaging the land, but virtually all that stuff was cleared out of the area before the levee was blown.
Maybe some of the farmers or ex-farmers here can comment further - I do not claim to be an expert on flooded farmland - I’m just relating what I’ve seen.
More precisely:
On a dollar vs. dollar basis, just what return are my tax dollars used for AGRICULTURAL subsidies getting?
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