Quote:
Originally Posted by payne171
Frank, I am not sure if you were referring to me directly with "wanna bet," but I made no reference to assuming you would eat the grain that came from "field corn." what I do know is that it has caused the cost of livestock to go up. I eat meat. Even if I stopped, the switch to plant alternatives would cause those prices to go up. Even if we choose to ignore those basic economic principles, that field could be producing edible food if the price of farm products weren't being ARTIFICIALLY driven up by a few upon the majority of the populace that are either against it or don't care.
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After production of ethanol, the distilleries sell a product called DDG (dried distiller's grain) and DDS (dried distiller's solubles) to the livestock industry - which contains from 50 to 90% of the food value by mass of the original whole corn, but only takes up 30% the space & weight (this is important for the cost of delivering and storing the food) - this is a low cost, high nutrition feed that is in every cow-burger you eat and probably saves you more money than you realize, because the "fuel" corn from which it comes only had to be harvested once, the land and equipment only had to be amortized once, and it's sold from one industry as waste to a second industry.
Two acres of corn produce ~150-160 bushels of corn worth of food value in the form of DDS/DDG, in addition to the ~860gal of ethanol also produced. This is compared to ~150-160 bushels of corn per acre at straight crop-food value.
Please, feel free to google it.
According to the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture, in this memo:
http://www.ethanol.org/pdf/contentmg...tter_61208.pdf
"During the first 4 months of 2008, the all food CPI increased by
4.8 percent, with increased ethanol and biodiesel consumption accounting for only about 4-5 percent of the total increase while other factors accounted for 95-96 percent of the Increase. " ... so what's the other 95+% increase? Looks like food demand, weather, and speculators. Yeah, speculators. Why aren't you complaining about them?
The same agencies claim "We estimate that, if we had not been blending ethanol into gasoline, gasoline prices would be between 20 cents per gallon to 35 cents per gallon higher." - well, what would a 10% increase in fuel cost do to the price of food that has to be shipped to you? Not to mention, how much less would your customers (whatever industry you're in) buy from you if they had to spend 10% more on their fuel?
I really don't know what's made ethanol as controversial as abortion, but for some reason people really get dug into it and this whole "OMG IT'S TAKING FOOD OFF MY PLATE WAAAAAAAHHH!!" thing is tiresome.
It's not taking food off your plate. Speculators are raising prices and breeders are raising demand, get mad at them instead.
Ethanol puts less pollution into the air, and keeps more dollars within our country than gasoline does, and gets us measurably closer to energy independence. Those are good things, stop fighting them.