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.