Posted on 02/13/2011 3:42:02 PM PST by mewykwistmas
Pig manure????
Let the free market produce it, end of game.
Yes, the study showed that distillers grains were, in fact, more valuable than ordinary corn.
But when it comes to hogs, and poultry, with a different digestive system, the efficiency falls off.
It’s hard to get a definative read on the value of the distillers grains, but most of what I’ve read puts it at about 50% to 75% the value of unprocessed corn.
Not nearly as much corn is actually going into ethanol as some claim. It’s being overstated by a factor of at least 2.
Ethanol is ‘good, good, good,’ Grassley says
Yeah, GOOD for eating the gaskets out of engines and dissolving fuel lines while it attracts water moisture to fu*& up your fuel filters.
It screws up my outboards.
Corn is for eating.
Ethanol is good for making farmers rich on our tax dollars, subsidizing ADM and Grassley’s re-election.
Again, the thing to look at is gain (pounds) per day put on a cow.
When we look at what cattle are fed in feedlots or on dairies, non-farmers have little idea what is fed to cattle. Cattle can be (and are) fed a HUGE variety of feedstuffs, so they don’t *have* to be fed corn.
Onions, pumpkins, cotton seed hulls. peanut aftermath, corn stover, rice hay that has been infused with anhydrous ammonia, hay of all types, wheat mids, barley, corn, soybean cake and soybeans, soybean aftermath... sugarbeet pulp (ie, beet pulp after they’ve cooked the sugar out of it), sugarbeet leaves, oats, oat hay...
then silages and haylages...
The list goes on and on and on and on. Cattle were never intended to be fed corn and straight grains - they’ve evolved to eat high-fiber feeds like long hay and grasses. The rumen is there to break that down. Same deal with sheep.
Now pigs - they’re omnivores and can eat just about anything. Corn fattens them up quickly too, but again, there’s nothing written in stone that whole corn or cob corn is all that pigs can eat. I’ve fed pigs alfalfa hay and oats. Works fine. Results in a leaner pig come slaughter time.
Chickens and other fowl - well there, we have a situation where the birds do best on either grain or bugs. They can eat alfalfa hay (and I’ve fed chickens alfalfa shatter and they do well on it and produce the best eggs I’ve ever eaten on alfalfa shatter and oats), but the economic reality became that corn was dirt-cheap, so the big chicken outfits converted to corn.
Corn has the highest net metabolic energy for cattle, followed by barley. That doesn’t mean it is best for feeding cattle, just that it has such a surplus of metabolic energy that the cattle put on fat *fast*.
The feedlots have had a 20+ year string of luck in that they’ve had fantastically cheap corn for feeding. But we (as a nation) were eating plenty of beef long before there was absurdly cheap corn available. Cattle used to be fatter coming off the range or pasture, with a very short finish put on them. Nowadays, they’re in a feedlot for 60+ days as they’re taken from stockers (about 800 to 900 pounds) up to about 1150 to 1200 lbs on the hoof, aka “fat cattle.”
Everyone has been spoiled by cheap corn. And the corn guys helped make sure that all manner of livestock and poultry producers got hooked on corn - after all, the corn guys have been trying to get rid of these HUGE corn surpluses for years and years - since the early 80’s, or about 20 years. Well, the corn guys were successful - they got everyone hooked on corn. Now that there’s a demand for it, the price is going up.
Then we should lift the import tariff on ethanol from Brazil and other cheap producers. That’s about the limit of what the “free market” can do here.
There will be ethanol in fuel for as long as the EPA mandates an oxygenate, namely, ethanol. Want to get ethanol out of your gasoline? You need to talk to the EPA, not farmers. And I’d be cool with that, because I don’t believe that there’s much upside to oxygenates in automotive fuels any more. Since we achieved a huge level of adoption of closed-loop electronic fuel injection in the US auto fleet, there’s no need for oxygenates in gasoline any more.
I must be a bit older than you, I can remember corn surpluses way back in the 50’s when I was a kid.
I used to raise hogs, 15,000 a year, which was a big operation in the 70’s and 80’s. Today the small operators are 10 times that production, the big guys a 100 times.
We feed a lot of different things to the hogs, from the corn stillage left over from fructose to outdated Snickers bars, gummy worms, you name it.
But the old mainstay was corn and soybean meal.
Quit lying Grassley. Ethanol has been found to not work. They have to recoup their losses so they are scamming the food market. They also have to scam a lot of money for themselves.
It’s only good for Grassley’s bank account.
There is nothing good about ethanol.
But the value of corn to the corn farmer in the 50’s, relative to inflation, was about where we are now in corn prices.
I can find (quickly) the price of corn in 1960, and it was a bit more than $1.00/bu. Adjust that forward for inflation and I get about $8.84/bu. We’re still a bit below that price. Beans would have to exceed $18.50 to catch up with inflation-adjusted prices from 1960. We’re not there yet either.
This is what I keep getting at: People have been living large on the farmer’s back for decades, and now commodity prices are going to catch up with decades of devaluation through inflation. People are going to cry, whine and moan.
Having been a farmer, I’m not. Never took a dime from Uncle Sugar.
I will say that this period of time would be an excellent time to talk about removal of the rest of any subsidy programs, crop insurance, LDP, marketing loans etc.
If people want to control the speed at which these price increases happen, then we should talk about putting the position limits back on speculators, as we had them prior to 2000.
I've heard the same, but it seems unlikely. Ethanol is now the primary octane-enhancing additive in gasoline. What does premium unleaded use in its place?
What????? All I know is, Ethanol has to be mandated by Govt. or there wouldn’t be a market.
.
Yet another establishment Fossil that needs to be shown the door!
Toluene, I believe.
See this document to see how octane is boosted where the application would not want to deal with the hygroscopic tendencies of ethanol:
http://www.chevronglobalaviation.com/docs/aviation_tech_review.pdf
Page 67 if you don’t want to wade through tons of additional info.
If people want “pure” gasoline with a high octane and no ethanol, go get some 100LL at your local small airport. It will cost more than regular pump gas, but it has no ethanol in it at all.
I've said much the same, just not so bluntly. People are going to cry and moan.
Athough it's artifical, the ethanol effect on farm prices, essentially bringing them back into line so farmers don't have to live in poverty, has Freepers and everyone else screaming already.
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