Some Sanity in the Blind Rush to Bio-fuels

[SE Iowa]

Does anyone here know how much more a box of corn flakes cost since corn has gone from $2.35 to $5.00? How about eggs? How much more does it cost to produce an egg? Does anyone here also know how many bushels of corn it takes to finish out a steer? How much does that add to the cost of the end product (price per pound of supermarket meat + 600lbs of by products)? I'm not trying to cause a stir but I notice we are represented by alot of heavily timbred states and not too many farming states. As usual, everyone thinks that they are right.

I for one am a farmer and a pharmacist as well. I see both sides of the debate. I do not necessarily believe that ethanol from corn is the answer (and think bio-diesel is a joke-has anyone calculated how much soy oil we could possibly produce). I do believe ethanol from corn is a START. I firmly believe the answer is going to come from a number of sources including conservation, ethanol, bio-diesel, WIND, Solar, hydropower, bio-mass, hybrid cars, locally grown products, timbre industry etc. Look at Brazil, with over 50% of their vehicle fuel coming from sugar-cane based ethanol. The solar, wind, coal, petroleum and wood industries have all had to go thru growing periods where they may not have been the most efficient or best use of resources (PV payback periods?) but as technology improves and new processes are developed and created things can get better.

By the way, a box of cornflakes is $0.09 more, an egg cost less than $0.03 per unit more, roughly 100 bushels of corn to finish a steer to a weight of 1200lbs (so additional cost of $265 per head) which leads to about $0.50 per pound or $0.12 for a 1/4 pound hamburger if all of the increase in cost was only given to the meat and not the byproducts. What do you think it cost to get that cow sent from my farm to the processor with labor and then send it to New York City to a steak house?

 

[Telco]

My mother has a small cattle farm, and she isn't really seeing any more per pound when she sells a cow than she did 5-6 years ago. Still around 1.50 a pound. Then they sell steaks for 10 bucks a pound and blame it on higher corn prices. Where does the cow get that much corn between being raised and being butchered? They don't eat that much corn in the feed lots. The issue is, everyone knows they can now ask what they want and blame fuel prices.

I still think biodiesel is the answer, for now. Used to be an ethanol proponent, but not as long as they are using corn. It costs a little more to use nonfood sources, which is why they won't do it. Biodiesel can actually be produced from (broken link removed to http://www.oregonlive.com/science/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/science/1205277917298560.xml&coll=7) in areas where food can't be grown. Not to mention algae will produce some 17 times more biodiesel per acre than soybeans. And, they are just now really beginning to research it. If they can get it to where they can get 5000 gallons of biodiesel per acre, I can convert an acre of my retirement property to grow algae and never buy another drop of fuel. Heh heh heh... :lol:


From the article:

"Algae also are highly productive compared with conventional crops. For example, a productivity model estimates that 48 gallons of biodiesel can be produced from an acre of soybeans. Algae could produce 819 gallons in a single acre, and theoretically as much as 5,000 gallons.

One of algae's most remarkable qualities is that it can grow using carbon dioxide generated from fossil-fuel combustion, Murthy says. Greenhouse gases from industry and coal-fired electrical generating plants can be piped to algae ponds, where carbon dioxide is a necessary ingredient for growth.

Research has shown that algae can grow 30 percent faster than normal when fed carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion. "


So far as why the US is anti-diesel? Ken45 hit it right on the head. The new Duramax diesels in the Chevy trucks don't have the knock or the smell, and now that they HAVE to get fuel economy up I'll bet we'll start seeing some small domestic diesel cars based on the Duramax. I'm really looking forward to this so I can put one in my 87 S15. On the 70s diesels, many owners would just replace the heads on their diesel blocks with gasoline heads, stick in lower compression pistons, and put on a carb intake to convert their "diesel" engines to run gasoline. That was all that was needed.

 

[SE Iowa]

I pretty much agree. I hope they can figure out the whole algae thing, but until then lets do what we can until the technology can fill in the gaps. There has never been a shortage of food in the world. It's politics that gets in the way. For example, the US farmers produced 12+ billion bu of corn, 2.3 billion bu of soybeans and somewhere around 4 billion bushels of wheat last year. That would be over 680 billion pounds of corn, 138 billion pounds of soybeans and 240 billion pounds of wheat for a total of nearly 1 trillion pounds of grain food. This does not include all the vegetable vrops that are actually what we consume in our daily diets excluding grains used to produce meat. IF we just used these 3 sources of food (corn, wheat, soybeans) we could supply every man, woman and child on the face of the planet with about 1/2 of pound of food per day. Maybe not all the nutritional requirements a person would need but then think about all the other foods produced and all the other food produced in the world. Take a drive to north dakota, montana and canada and look at all the edible beans, peas canola and countless other edible foods.

What I'm trying to say as others have, we all know that the price of oil is not because of any shortages or increased use by other countries (china, etc). Ethanol production has not caused the supposed increases in food cost in the supermarket either. Trucking, which relies upon fuel, is SOME of it and the other is just the little extra that everyone else takes along the way.

By the way, why is no one mad at the commodity traders that have created the histeria in both the corn/soybean as well as the petroleum pits? It seems to me that all this happened so suddenly, like we now all of the sudden use more oil than 2 months ago. This market is artificial!