Blog Action Day

I was looking for a good reason to make a blog entry. Today's Blog Action Day is that reason. I really wonder some times if burning corn is an environmentally concious thing to do. The fuel, its true, is renewable. But yet, it relies on the oil infrastructure to be in place. Farming is a resource intensive operation. Between the diesel fuel used in implements, to the natural gas feedstock that makes nitrogen based fertilizers, there is a lot of consumption. In the case of a serious shortage of these fossil fuels, corn burning isn't going to be in our future either.

So what is? Biomass fuels? Switchgrass? Or, something that is yet out there on the horizon? I have great confidence the inventor making up the corn burning community will be there at the forefront of what is next.


I would like to see this movie when it makes the rounds. Hopefully the preview shows up here in this blog above.

An interesting article in the Star Tribune last week. The Boom Fades as Ethanol Floods the Marketplace Profits are in the gutter because of the high cost of corn and the soft demand for ethanol. I wonder how much lower the profits are going to be in a couple of years when the administration in Washington changes and people are allowed to take a closer look at the ethanol business. My guess is the government payouts to the corporate ethanol producers are going to dissapear and suddenly there will be a firesale as oil, and other large corporations rush over themselves getting out of the business.

What will happen to farmers then? The ones that tied their whole future to selling five dollar a bushel corn are going to be in for a rude awaking. I hope that farm subsidies have not been allowed to expire while the general public has been looking the other way. Thinking about all the happy motoring they will be able to do in their ethanol powered SUV.

The weekend at Moms

I spent the weekend visiting my mother in the nursing home this last weekend. She is one of the few residents with an intact mind. Her problem is her 90 year old body just isn't what it used to be. Unfortunately for her also, her taste buds are still intact. It is a rough combination. Nothing worse than being mentally sharp enough to know; what you are eating should taste like meat...

The weekend also brought in in contact with the rest of the family who unlike me an my computer screen earn their money from farming. Two of them are big farmers, with thousands of acres in the ground, the others are much smaller operations. Universally their advice was to buy corn now. Two weeks ago would have been better. Now understand, this is a pretty small geographic sample, they farm in Mower and Filmore counties in Southern Minnesota. But all of them feel the crop is much smaller than expected. The good news for them, it is also dryer than expected. Corn was running 16-18% moisture. At this level no expensive drying would be necessary. They can run it into the bins and turn on the air circulation fan to dry it the last few points down to 15% needed for storage. It is much cheaper to run a fan rather than a fire. They will save thousands of dollars of propane. But, still, the crop is not as big as expected. The ears are smaller, the test weight is lighter and the yield is down from last year. All things that will cause our per bushel price to rise.

Also it was interesting to talk to them about the ethanol business. They all felt they were making hay while the sun shines. The ethanol business is a fluke of the government we live under right now. When the government changes, as it is almost sure to next fall, the status quo is going to change. My brother in law had invested money into an ethanol plant a couple of years ago, but he was very excited for it to begin production in the spring so he could immediately sell his shares.

An interesting report sent to me by my friend Andrew.

This report responds to a request by Senator James Inhofe for analysis of a “25-by-25" proposal that combines a requirement that a 25-percent share of electricity sales be produced from renewable sources by 2025 with a requirement that a 25-percent share of liquid transportation fuel sales also be derived from renewable sources by 2025.

This report I feel has some flaws. It assumes we continue our happy motoring society, everyone still behind the wheel of their own car. These people totally have their heads up their backsides. Everything is based on status quo. ...oh, wait, no, not status quo. They say auto traffic will go down by 1.6% :-) These polititions will blow sunshine up any oriface they can to not break it to the public the happy motoring utopia is over! Oil is the highest price it has ever been, with many people reporting we may have passed our world peak oil production in 2006. That means in the last hundred years we have used half of the available oil reserves, but yet according to this report, 25 years from now we are still going to be driving our cars to Walmart, buying plastic crap shipped here from China? Does that seem plausible to you?

Plus they make some rather bold leaps of faith. 61 billion gallons of ethanol produced? We produced 5.5 billion gallons last year and the price of corn doubled. And cellulosic ethanol? We haven't actually done that yet at the scale required to run an ethanol plant. Some people doubt we can get the feedstock to the ethanol plant in a viable fashion even if we figure out the technical hurdles of how to produce the ethanol.

We need to start thinking more locally.