Posted on 07/26/2007 5:46:51 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Grand Rapids, Mich. - Ronald Reagan once said that the most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." His one-liner immediately comes to mind when looking at the problems behind the federal government's campaign to boost production of corn-based ethanol with a massive 51-cent-per-gallon subsidy.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Variable compression, variable injection engines will perform better with ethanol; ordinary engines will have less power and poorer mileage.
A 1950’s vintage naturally aspirated long stroke Offenhauser makes an ideal ethanol friendly engine.
You don’t seem to have any experience with logic from what I can tell.
Don't make bizarre allegations if you don't want to be called on them.
A lot of people don't realize that there's less energy in ethanol than in gasoline, and consequently, you burn more of it to produce the same work in an internal combustion engine. The more you burn, the greater the exhaust.
Mark
What nutrients do you think are removed from corn used as ethanol feedstock?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1861790/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1861233/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1859974/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1858095/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1857162/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1852378/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1850059/posts
Start reading....
And Yes, sugar, and starch, and name even one common food product not effected by the price of corn — I bet you can’t.
Have you told us yet how much corn you think a dairy cow eats in a day?
I have used union 76 for years that does contain ethanol. I use it because Calif has MTBE in all the other gas and that stuff is deadly on the water systems let alone our lungs. I have not really found any problems accept that my fuel pump in my truck gas tank started to not hold pressure.
6 of the 10 products you mentioned use corn starch, corn oil, or sweeteners in normal commercial production.
(summer) lactating dairy cows.
Feeds lbs./cow/day
Alfalfa silage 10.00
Corn silage 50.00
Shelled corn 10.00
Now I’m done with you.
And I'll be done with you (right after this post of course).
The USDA reports the average retail price of whole milk in the City of Indianapolis (my state capitol) this July to be $3.80 per gallon. At 8 gallons per cow, ole Bessie produces $30.40 per day in retail product. The cost to the dairyman, at today's CBOT close, for the corn fed to Bessie today was $.57
Corn planting is up 19% this year from last year. We will be up to our @sses in corn. It won’t affect food prices at all.
The whole story is a yawner.
I am still looking for the consensus of scientist who say a CO2 molecule from ethanol is better for global warming reduction than a CO2 molecule from gasoline. Gotta be some reason for this stupidity.
the middle men can raise the price and the consumer doesn't see it. Farmers work hard for their money, and nobody gives them credit for being productive....but non farmers can sure look down their collective noses at farmers and ridicule them as being country hicks.., and then they complain if the farmer makes a buck or two......sheesh.
The yield in ethanol per acre varies form 330 to 440 gallons.
As a farmer who sells feed (high-test alfalfa hay) to California dairies, here’s the secret of what causes milk prices to go up/down the most:
The numbers of fresh cows in milking parlors. Period, end of discussion. Feed prices aren’t the driving factor.
When the dairymen control the number of springers they’re going to bring on-line, they can keep milk prices high.
When the dairymen see high milk prices, they start raising a lot of heifers to add to their lines, and when those heifers drop, then they crater milk prices, usually within three to six months.
It’s the old saying: Show the American farmer a profit, and he’ll rather quickly show you a surplus.
Milk prices have been higher than they are now very recently. Matter of fact, it was only back in 2002/2003 that Class I milk was up at over $19/cwt in the CA market.
The price then promptly crashed downwards to about $10 to $11/cwt for 18 months, because too many dairy farmers expanded cow numbers too fast.
Last summer’s heat wave took out quite a few cows in the southwest, so dairy prices started going back up. The dairy co-ops started encouraging farmers to not replace milkers as they were culled in the last year, so they’ve re-established some profitable price levels for fluid Class I and Class III milk.
The price of the feed going into the TMR rations for milkers is a very small component of any increase in milk prices. Matter of fact, I can tell you what happens when there is an abundance of milk (and low fluid milk prices) and dent corn or corn silage prices go up: hay prices go down, because the dairy farmers try to screw the hay farmers out of pricing power for alfalfa hay as long as there is surplus hay out there.
Only when they got the number of milkers and replacements down to a point where they quit dumping milk at $10/cwt into the market did the price of milk start going up again.
BTW — as the price of corn goes up, you should see what the California dairymen substitute into their TMR’s: beet pulp, pumpkins, silage soybean mush, DDG’s, you name it. It is pretty humorous to watch .... unless you’re a hay farmer.
It is the source of the carbon that is at issue.
When you burn a gallon of crude oil, you’re liberating carbon that had previously been sequestered in the ground.
When you burn a gallon of ethanol or biodiesel, you’re liberating carbon from plant material, that is then re-sequestered in next year’s crop, and then re-liberated, etc, etc.
The point of bio-fuels is that the act of growing the bio-fuel feedstock takes CO2 out of the air and puts it into carbon in the plant matter, only some of which is then harvested and re-released back into the atmosphere.
With oil/natural gas/coal — the carbon is released, never to be completely re-captured.
Ethanol production has caused corn based livestock feed to go from $4.00 per 100# a year ago to $8.50 per 100# now. We are seeing this in the cost of meat, eggs, dairy products, anything that uses corn oil, or corn syrup and even canned corn and corn on the cob. Besides that, it’s more expensive than the gasoline that it is supposed to replace.
This has to rank up there with global warming as one of the stupidest things that has ever been perpetrated on the American public.
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