Posted on 02/13/2011 3:42:02 PM PST by mewykwistmas
I don’t have the estimates for 2011, but 40% is doubtful, as there hasn’t even been enough time for new ethanol plants to come online. In fact, some have gone broke and are no longer in business. 30% would be my guess as to the actual level.
As to the feed value; when you get into the study you’ll find distillers grain has a varied value, in some instances more valuable than ordinary corn, some situations far less.
The upshot of the studies (Cattle, hogs, poultry) is pretty much what I summed up, distillers grains (what is left over after the ethanol process) is worth about 1/2 of ordinary corn.
We are actually using (net) about 10 to 20% of our corn crop for ethanol.
There are A LOT of reasons not to produce ethanol on a large scale, why those opposed to it use easily, scientifically, disprovable argument is always puzzleing to me.
And doncha just love the way he portrays Big Agro as “family farms”? Doesn’t that just bring a tear to your eye?
Of course he'd be a little sensitive about it.
“given the farmer’s flight to free government cheese”
I’ll handle that cheap shot separately:
Converting the crops to meat has helped reduce the oversupply of feedstuffs, but ethanol has been the real boon for farmers. For once, the grain market price has allowed the farmers to opt out of “Cheap Food for Consumers Program”, or at least reduce their dependence on it.
Farmers are now receiving a fair price for their crops, and, independent cusses that they are, when they aren’t forced to enroll into the government programs just to stay in business, they don’t.
Fine. Do it on your own dime. Kill the subsidization and ethanol from corn is dead. It’s a boondoggle
There, that’s a valid argument against large scale ethanol production.
It has increased every year since then, up until last year it was not all that hard to find good fuel, now you just about need to make your own for small gas engines.
Oil companies are buying up ethanol production.
Grassley should know that.
There aren’t too many family farms around these days. Fortunately we have one locally that farms a variety of of vegetables for a roadside stand.
That said, the traditional family farm can’t feed a nation of more than 300,000,000. They are unable to compete against the big farms that get the subsidies. There has to be a middle ground somewhere and subsidies for farms need to disappear.
When I was a young man I worked on a large (For Michigan) dairy farm that farmed some 3,500 acres and had 6 or 7 full time employees. Technically a family farm but big enough for subsidies. I learned about subsidies (and dishonesty) when I watched them plow 300 acres of young corn because there was better money in subsidized soy beans than the corn would bring on the market.
Exactly what subsidy are we talking about here?
Which is why I get a kick out of reading about these hedge funds buying up farmland in the midwest in the last year. The outcome of that move is so predictable that I wish there were a way to short those funds...
And what difference does that make, I’m still force to use, it force to pay some welfare farmer to grow it, and force to pay some business to make it. And I don’t want the crap. How is this any damn different than making people buy insurance under obamma care. But then i guess you support that as well.
I read somewhere here On FR that premium grade contains no ethanol. Please correct me if that isn’t true.
Just like Clapper, Director of Intelligence. oxymoron
We use food for fuel and oil is bad to these people. Sheer madness.
Distillers’ grains are, in some ways, better than steam/flake corn for feeding in feedlots.
The starches/sugars in whole corn result in a condition called “acidosis” when you put cattle on corn & grain diets too quickly.
The feedlot guys would like to get cattle on high metabolic energy feed ASAP to get them gaining as quickly as possible. In feedlots, the story is all about “pounds per day gain,” where they want to see between 2 to 4 lbs/day gain on a steer.
Some farmer, who grows field corn without subsidy, can sell his corn to the local ethanol plant at a higher price than taking it down to the elevator, OR, he receives a higher price at the elevator for his crop than he did before the ethanol plant existed.
Where is he receiving “welfare?”
All I see him receiving is a higher price.
Which, BTW, is still only about 50% of the inflation-adjusted price from before the Arab oil embargo shot up farm costs to the moon and farmers could no longer support a family on what they made on a farm.
If you want to complain about ethanol being in gasoline, you need to complain to the EPA, because they’re the ones who insist on an oxygenate being in gasoline at all. MTBE was removed, the EPA wanted something else rather than nothing, and so we got ethanol.
I think the ethanol experiment is a mistake, a big mistake.
To base arguments against it using ‘facts’ that aren’t facts at all, but rather propoganda that is easily refuted by true scientific facts, is foolish.
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