Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

> The misguided politics of corn ethanol
> Published: September 19, 2007
>  http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/news/edethanol.php
>
>
> Backed by the White House, corn-state governors and solid blocks on both
> sides of Congress' partisan divide, the politics of biofuels could hardly
> look sunnier. The economics of the American drive to increase ethanol in
> the energy supply are more discouraging.
>   
> The distortions in agricultural production are startling. Corn prices are
> up about 50 percent from last year, while soybean prices are projected to
> rise up to 30 percent in the coming year, as farmers have replaced soy with
> corn in their fields. The increasing cost of animal feed is raising the
> prices of dairy and poultry products.
>   
This is misleading. The price of animal products doesn't rise until 
farmers stop producing animals because of high costs of corn. The 
increase in animal products prices right now is mostly due to the 
distorted low prices we had in the past, and the fact that the 
processors finally figured out that the cost of processing was going up 
due to high oil prices and trucking costs, so they raised the price of 
consumer items. The money we are throwing at China has created increased 
demand for meats and other high energy products.
This article makes the implication that farmers have some choice about 
the prices they get for animal products. We haven't seen nuthin' yet.

> The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than
> importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States
> slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the
> government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol
> producers - on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already
> receive under the farm program.
>   
Another misleading and disconnected piece of writing. First, the 
solution to the energy demand problem is to conserve, not to buy 
Brazilian ethanol. Second, the corn growers don't get subsidies if the 
price of corn is above a certain level. High corn prices eliminate 
subsidies.

> Corn-based ethanol also requires a lot of land. An OECD report two years
> ago suggested that replacing 10 percent of America's motor fuel with
> biofuels would require about a third of the total cropland devoted to
> cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops.
>   
The amount of land is not as important as what corn growing DOES TO the 
land. Depletion of organic matter, contamination with pesticides, 
monoculture problems with weed timing and the encouragement of mergers 
and acquisitions that take people away from the land and put bigger 
machines on the land.
> Meanwhile, the environmental benefits are modest. A study published last
> year by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated
> that after accounting for the energy used to grow the corn and turn it into
> ethanol, corn ethanol lowers emissions of greenhouse gases by only 13 percent.
>   
Again, the environmental issue shouldn't be to compare corn ethanol to 
sugar cane ethanol or to petroleum, but to compare the emissions of 
wasteful behaviors to conservative behaviors and frugal behaviors. Most 
of the demand for fuel is for people doing things they don't really need 
to do, such as drive individual cars to jobs that do nothing for the 
future of the world. Better to take the money spent on ethanol subsidies 
and pay people to stay home from their advertising jobs, just as the 
government used to pay farmers not to grow corn. We have an excess of 
advertising, so where are the economists to tell us that we should 'weed 
out' the weak advertisers?
> The United States will not meet the dual challenges of reducing global
> warming and its dependence on foreign suppliers of energy until it manages
> to reduce energy consumption. That should be its main goal.
>   
This should have been the first paragraph of the article; conservation 
shouldn't be the 'afterthought'.
> What's wrong is letting politics - the kind that leads to unnecessary
> subsidies, the invasion of natural landscapes best left alone and soaring
> food prices that hurt the poor - rather than sound science and sound
> economics drive America's energy policy.
>   
Another mistaken thought. Soaring food prices only hurt the dependent 
poor. They do wonders for the rural poor who grow food. They could do 
wonders for the urban poor that grow food, also. 
(http://www.growingpower.org) Cheap food has destroyed our rural middle 
class that added value to products of the family lands.
"Sound Economics" are local economics; putting producers and consumers 
together without processors and middlemen and government agencies to 
loan money for farm expansions and  factory buildings and giant manure 
pits. "Sound Economics" are when a person can live on the value of their 
labors, without massive Systems of Systems to inflate monetary prices 
and denigrate their work by replacing people with unnecessary machinery 
or bureaucracy, all in the false names of Profit and Oversight.

Dan