Food Report: One Harvest Away from a Catastrophe

Financial Sense ^ | 07/27/2012 | By Richard Mills

[jjotto]

Someone noticed!

Trick question. There is no specific ethanol subsidy.

[Harold Shea]

Also the corn stalks themselves can be dangerous with

High levels of fertilizer.Dangerous to roll and feed cows

It is a disaster in slo mo.

[DeaconBenjamin]

That’s a strong accusation.

[Texas Fossil]

I agree with most of the article you posted. No doubt the affect suggested will happen eventually.

But the sky is not falling, yet.

It is easy to be negative and that is not what should be felt here in the US.

This is truly not in our hands. This will play out as God plans.

Should we be concerned? Yes. But man’s vision of the future is seen through a glass darkly.

[Gorzaloon]

Field corn is the mast majority of corn grown in the US and the world and is what goes into ethanol production. I suppose it could be eaten fresh (on the cob) but it wouldn't have much taste. It matures and fills the kernal and then dents and dries down so it can be harvested with a combine. The cobs and husks are left in the field

Is that what some people call "Shell corn"?

[HereInTheHeartland]

Not really familiar with that term; I guess shelled corn might be a term.
Corn is dry; it is stored at around 15% moisture. Harvested as dry as possible, then is normally dried with LP or natural gas fired dryers immediately after harvest.

If you see dry ears sold in grocery stores for squirrels to eat; that is field corn. The same corn farmers harvest; but farmers would run it through a combine in the field and separate the corn from the cob.

[PapaBear3625]

So bottom line line is that ethanol production probably isn't the best thing for us to be doing. But it is not as bad a thing as some people say it is. It is also not as good a thing as some say!

It would be best to let the market decide. I understand that the kind of corn that's planted is not what people would like to eat themselves. Then again, if there's less of a market for it, then farmers would plant something else.

The big thing that concerns me is that the price of food looks like it will go up. This will not be a crisis for me personally -- if the price of food doubled, we would wind up eating less steak and more chicken, but we would get by. The people in the Third World, however, who barely make enough to buy even cheap food, would be in deep trouble.

[Wonder Warthog]

"You see there? Another man smarter than I who says we cannot eat corn used for Ethanol production. No matter how hungry we are."

Never said that. You can eat a lot of things in an emergency, but in normal commerce, corn used for ethanol is NOT normally used as food for humans, except indirectly (the non-carb fraction left after ethanol is made is excellent livestock feed, and the products of THAT are quite tasty).

[Gorzaloon]

Thanks..I had to ask, and am a little ashamed of the reason. I grew up around dairy farms. When we were kids we stole some big beautiful ears from a farmer's field.

They would NOT cook, and you could not chew the stuff. So it must have been for the cows.

[gibsosa]

thanks for the very informative post!