DOWN with biofuels

[jon lynn]

Germany Like most Germans, brewer Helmut Erdmann is all for the fight against global warming. Unless, that is, it drives up the price of his beer.

And that is exactly what is happening to Erdmann and other German brewers as farmers abandon barley the raw material for the national beverage to plant other, subsidized crops for sale as environmentally friendly biofuels.

"Beer prices are a very emotional issue in Germany people expect it to be as inexpensive as other basic staples like eggs, bread and milk," said Erdmann, director of the family-owned Ayinger brewery in Aying, an idyllic village nestled between Bavaria's rolling hills and dark forests.

"With the current spike in barley prices, we won't be able to avoid a price increase of our beer any longer," Erdmann said, stopping to sample his freshly brewed, golden product from a steel fermentation kettle.

DON'T RAISE MY BIER PRICES! Real German bier is one of the few pleasures I can afford here with the weak dollar. No pasturized flovorless North American beer for me......................yet
:mad:

[skeet]

I kind of feel for ya man..
But on the other hand it might be about time farmers got a fair price for their wares also. Been on both sides of this coin. but farmed for a lot of years and can tell ya that the price of crops raised on farms really hasn't been all that good for the farmer. Even in Germany..it may be time for farmers to make out better. Sorry the beer prices may go up though. But maybe it may be time to quit drinkin!!!:confused: Think of all the money you will save..so ya can spend it on shootin..or cigarettes or somethin else more important:D :D

[BILLY D.]

Just to brighten everyones day, OPEC is stomping both feet and waving their arms in the air and threatening to raise oil prices even further if Biofuels are produced.

This is getting curiouser and curiouser. Something I don't understand is that I read someplace that the U.S. gets most of it's oil from Mexico and Canada. We had better have a cranial rectal inversion and start drilling or we are really gonna get the purple shaft with a barbed wire cluster ribbon.

No wonder the CEO'S at the major oil companies can retire with hundred million dollar severance packages.

BOHICA.

Best wishes, Bill

[Dan Morris]

I remember when the Alaska PL was to solve all our woes.....
last I heard, it was an export item!!!!!!hey, we're had and no one is gonna do any thing about it.
Dan
:mad:

[GoodOlBoy]

Jon I don't think getting rid of biofuels is the answer. Instead I think more planting in old fallow fields IS the answer. Here in the US (as I am sure many people know) we have HUGE fields that the goverment STILL pays farmers NOT to plant each year.

I have said for years that we need to change from an industrial society to an agrarian one, and I still believe we do. I also believe it is comming. It is only a matter of time before people realize that renewable fuel, food, and textiles work too well together to keep the synthetic and petroleum markets going forever.

Sometime read the contents of a tub of margarine, then read the contents of a stick of plain old fashioned butter. Since one contains around thirty chemicals produced by DOW and other chemical companies, and the other contains water salt and annote (A flower used to help color the butter yellow) which do you think costs the enviroment, and the economy more to make?

Take a look at your basic cotton T-shirt, then take a look at your rayon/spandex/whatever shirt and think about this again.

Now look at gasoline verses ethanol. Professors can BS us all they want about what ethanol takes to manufature, but when was the last time a giant corn spill killed millions of fish? When was the last time a safflower plant, sunflower field, or canola plant burned to the ground and polluted everything around it and people had to be evacuated? These same people who will tell you that ethanol takes more energy to produce than gas never give you WHAT it takes to produce gas. I have seen the wells going up all around me. I know how many thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel are burned to log out a forest and burn it down so that a new rig can go up and burn fueld and energy for a year or more to drill into the earth. Then how much fueld is used by workers going back and forth? How many creeks, rivers, and lakes are polluted from the spilloff of these operations? How much energy does it take to get that crude oil out of the ground and too the refinery? How much energy does it take to refine it? How much does it take to ship it to storage tanks as gas? How much does it take then to ship it to gas stations?

Myself I don't want my beer prices to go up either, and I want my gas prices to come down. But what I really want is to see thousands of people who WANT to go back to farming to be able to because it has become profitable again. If one farmer stops planting grain for beer to plant grain for fuel, then why can't another farmer who is being paid by the goverment NOT to plant a crop go plant that beer grain and raise it? Because he is being paid not to.

Makes you think a little don't it?

And by the way don't start badmouthin my coors!

:D

GoodOlBoy

[Dom]

Strangely, and I'm not arguing, the price for a like size beverage is pretty much straight across the board over here. For example, don't matter if you order water, coke, sprite, apple juice or beer, you're gonna pay the same price. Soooo, on that note, think I'll have 'nother Pils :D, Bitte, Waidmannsheil, Dom.

[fabsroman]

GOB,

You make some really good points, and when one of our cars finally dies, which I hope is not for a decade, I will be in a really good position to decide on hybrid or ethanol because the manufacturers will have had plenty of time to work the bugs out and I will be able to determine how hard it is to get ethanol.

Maybe, just maybe, if farming actually becomes profitable, farmers will be less likely to sell their farms out the developers and we won't have all this crappy sprawl. That should also give us more places to hunt, and if crops become that valuable I am willing to bet that farmers wouldn't want deer or geese eating them up, so they would be more apt to give hunters permission to hunt, kind of like how Rocky gets permission every year to hunt prairie dogs and had the farm owner begging him to come out this year. God, that would be nice.

I did note a couple of places where I could argue with you about the cost to produce ethanol. For instance, if food costs are driven up across the board, not just beer, but bread, milk, butter, etc., are we really in a better position. Most people can move closer to work and avoid the cost of fuel, but it is somewhat hard for some of us to eat less even though we have an obesity problem in the US. Some other issues were with the transport of ethanol. Ethanol cannot be transported via pipelines because it destroys the pipelines. So, it has to be transported via truck, which can make it rather tough. Another issue is this, do we really know how deadly an ethanol spill is? Is ethanol harmful if it is spilled into the ocean, or does it just evaporate? I don't know the answer to this one, so I am asking about it so I can be more knowledgeable in this debate later on.

[M.T. Pockets]

I live 13 miles from one of the largest ethanol plants in the U.S. The largest ethonal plant contractor has their HQ 15 miles in the other direction and ethanol is big medicine here. Very big.

Ethanol has definitely impacted the price of grain. Corn is $3.66 per bushell today compared to an average price of about $1.85 a couple years ago. More acres are going into corn production and less acres of other crops (soybeans, wheat, alfalfa...) are being put in, so the price for those commodities is increasing also.

I can't to argue how much it costs to produce a gallon of ethanol, or how much pollution is caused by producing it compared to fossil fuels, because I don't know. I know each has it's drawbacks, as does coal and nuclear.

Here are some observations from living in the middle of the ethanol belt. Land prices are going up drastically and farming is becoming more and more intense. Remember those CRP fields on marginal cropland that you like to hunt ? They're going to get plowed up to plant more corn. Same with pasture land and other marginal land. Hunting land will decline and so will wildlife populations. More sloughs will be drained.

Food prices will definitely go up. I agree that commodity prices should have been higher for the last 20 some years. I grew up on a farm and my family has made a living on the same farm for over 100 years. But food consumers have to realize they're getting took, commodity prices were this high (even higher) during the 1970's and cheerios were a whole lot cheaper then than today. There is about 5 cents of oats in a box of cheerios. Meat prices will get higher due to increased feed costs, and more land being used for pastures to raise cattle will get plowed up and corn will be planted on it. Fewer calves = higher prices.

Ethanol consumers are also getting took. I don't trust Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill any more than I trust the oil companies. They're in business to make money and they're not going to base the price of their ethanol according to the price of gasoline. E85 follows the gas prices and here it is usually 40 cents lower. The overall cost is about the same since it doesn't give the mileage that gasoline does.

I'd like to see us less dependent on foreign oil (any oil) as much as anybody, and I do support the higher commodity prices for our farmers (this also means less gov't subsidies in price supports). But let's not get our hopes up that Ethanol is going to solve all of our fuel problems and get the cost down to $1.50 a gallon.

[GoodOlBoy]

Oh I ain't sayin its the pure rainbow of goodness don't get me wrong. BUT I am saying that it is a MORE viable alternative than what we have now.

Land getting sold? Yep around Texas cities are growing outward because old unused farm land is cheaper to buy and put a NEW mall on that to rent a place in the OLD mall. IE it is turning alot of older city areas into slums as they are abandoned. This whole time the amount of plantable acerage is dropping.

Cattle? El same same. Alot of ranchers I know dropped out of the cow buisness ten years back when the price paid to RANCHERS dropped to almost nothing. Feed has cost almost more than a cow is worth for over 15 years. Most of those ranchers went to raising hay or selling hunting leases over planted oats because it was better money. Now? Who knows.

You are right on MT. The American consumer has been getting rooked for decades. The gas companies are STILL recording record profits. You think the war or an oil shortage has a damned thing to do with it? You are wrong. It is about profit PURE and SIMPLE.

GoodOlBoy

[skeet]

GOB,
Being in the farming (industry) for so long I can tell you why the fields are fallow and not being plowed for bio or whatever.

The Conservation reserve program and others are paying farmers not to produce so that prices on the grain commodities can be kept up to a figure that produces a profit. If the farmers were to plant that ground there would be surpluses of grains that would lower the prices to an unprofitable level...also the losses of game bird and animals would really hurt. In Md where I farmed..the CRP programs were put into effect to stop erodable soils from being farmed and provided land for all kinds of wildlife to live and prosper on. On the 35 acres I had in the program..I had 3 coveys of wild quail where almost all the wild quail have been missing from for 25 yrs. So there are good reasons to have a lot of land out of cultivation. It's gotten to the point where no one can get into farming by buying the farm and paying for it with profits from raising crops or critters.

Another problem right now is there is not enough infrastructure(distilleries and refineries) available to take advantage of all the extra grain that could be produced so that biofuels can be our saviour. Also, don't forget that all that energy you were talking about to produce fuels from oil still have to be used to produce biofuel and don't forget transporting and distributing costs will still be the same. There are also biohazards with bio fuels also. But there are also some things that will be bi-products such as animal feed etc. Just remember..TANSTAAFL...There ain't no such thing as a free lunch...really! :rolleyes: I wish ther was.

And in answer to the thing about the Alaska Pipeline...heck it was slated for export from the word GO. The pipe was mostly purchased from the Japanese...and that is where a preponderance of the exported Alaskan oil goes. I was up there when they started to build the blasted thing and remember all the controversy very well.

[jon lynn]

Wow are you guys deep!:eek:

I'm just worried about German bier prices going up!:D

[skeet]

Who cares about Beer?? Beer sucks!! Now if you were talking about good ol Southern Comfort...I'd be worried too!!:D :D

[fabsroman]

Funny, I could care less about beer or So Co., but if Riesling goes up I'll be pissed. I'm not much for beer or liquor, but I do like some good wine with dinner. That is about all I drink and it isn't too often, so I splurge and go for the $10+ bottles. I know, I know, I'm a big spender when it comes to wine. LOL

[jon lynn]

A case of German brew is 20 bottles, which last me about 6 to 8 weeks, unless company comes and drinks it all up. It is just I have been here so long, I am not big on change. A lot of the European states here have rock old laws that were never to change, for the benifit of the people.

Like here in Bavaria, beer was to be held in a specific price range, kinda like the Egyptians, the beer was a source of nourishment not a crutch. For the longest time in France the bagette was never to cost more than 1 Franc.................I got here in January 1983, and this place grew on me. Except for two years at Ft Hood, and the 14 months I needed to go back to the US to get back on SOFA status (get a military job), I've been here most of my adult life.


The gas prices here have always been horrorific, but food staples, (und Deutsche Bier!) have always been pretty stable. It saddens me to see some of the few good laws, that are hundreds of years old change.

[GoodOlBoy]

Skeet I ain't saying replant ALL that which is laying fallow. Far from it. I do understand what that coudl do to the farmers. I am saying don't completely abandone a grain crop when there IS land to be planted to keep the price steady. IE if barley is going through the roof because of less planting then plant barley in some fallow fields to keep the price steady. As for wild game when I was a kid we used a little ol system called crop rotation. IE ya don't blast an plow the same hunk of ground every danged year. That way you keep your wild game, AND you keep your soil producing. Who woulda thunk such an OLD idear would still be apllicable. Certainly not these college edumacated yo-yos that tell ya to plow it all under and pour a ton of fertillizer on top.

Yeah I am about as deep as a mudpuddle most of the time. Ya get me on farmin an agriculture though an yer on a old deep well here. Most of my military family were farmers and ranchers growing up. Thats why we hunted and fished so much.

GoodOlBoy

[skeet]

I didn't think you were unedumacated on farming or nothing. The only problem we have now days is this. Lead times on crops are so long. The grain markets are volatile. If the soybean crop looks as though it's gonna be poor...then the money people buy a bunch of extra grain from South America. Then when the crops come off here the price is down again. Oh and don't forget farmers see a raise in prices and they plant more of that crop...then the price is down because the acreage planted is so much larger. And the biggest thing is the American farmer for the most part isn't a family farmer any longer. They are corporations that are interested in making the most money with the resource so they don't do the crop rotation thing. They don't leave ground fallow. The family business farmers are the same way. And right now go out and buy a farm and pay for it farming. Won't happen. Probably won't even get a loan to buy the land. Just checked a few minutes ago. The price of out of the field Wheat is 4 dollars and December corn is 3.91. This is the time of year I contracted my corn if the price was right. Then if ya don't have storage you have to pay storage rent of so many cents a month. That farming business isn't a family farmer John in the back 40 thing any more. By the way...The government is going to let some of the acreage in the CRP program be taken out without penalty, as long as the ground is used for grain production that will go to Biofuel production. Yeah, sure, how will they know where it goes..unless they contract with one of the biofuel companies. And some of them also sell grain commodities. Wish it would work...but big business is involved amn. That means more money out of you(and my) pockets! I'm just full of Doom and Gloom, huh?
Well not really..gonna buy the farm next to me if I can get it for the right price. We're close on that...and there is another 85 acre place right down the road I might buy....:confused: :confused:

[fabsroman]

GOB,

What you are forgetting is greed and economics. If a farmer can make 4 times as much money growing corn instead of barley with the same amount of work, why would he want to plant barley unless the price of barley is close to that of corn. As the price of corn increases due to high demand for ethanol, there will be less barley produced. With less barley being produced and the same demand for barley, or other crops for that matter, the price of barley and other crops will also increase. It is a simple supply and demand curve. As supply decreases the price will increase and the demand will decrease (i.e., people will not buy as much beer because it costs more).

[GoodOlBoy]

Oh fabs believe you me I ain't forgetting about greed or economics. But sooner or later that field is going to give out, and no amount of chemical additive is going to get a decent crop out of it. Those who don't believe it look at the cost of nitrogen alone this year. By the way organic fertilizers such as rabbit, and chicken manure do wonders for your crops. half a dozen rabbits will produce more manure than you can use on twenty acres of land (mostly because it will burn crops if you put it too thick on the rows. Best to just run it between the rows and let the rain soak it in.

Skeet, I knew ya didn't think I was unedumacated (And by the way for those at home I spell it thataway on porpoise (Yep dolphins are involved). I hope you do get the land brother. I really do. If more hunters and farmers had more land and worked together, and less of it was in the hands of corporate farms I think we would be better off.

Back to greed. The problem is that small farms COULD make the money too IF the goverment would spend a little of that fallow ground money on puttin buyers BACK in hub towns along transport lines. Remember those days? When you could take a crop to town and sell it? My grandfather and his family had a dozen different crops they would plant in different fields for that very purpose. You plant cucumbers here for pickles (Don't let em get too big they won't se and you have to eat em yerself), Tomatoes here for canned tomato buyers, corn there for corn buyers, beets, radishes, peppers, you name it. You are and canned the leftovers at home. I have spent MANY a day in a pea patch fightin fire ants, wasps, hornets, and snakes for a toesack full of peas, just to have to go back and do it again tomorrow.

You know how much work that gets to be, and I miss every danged minute of it. Heck if I had to choose between sitting on my arse watching TV and pickin peas I would be in the pea patch ANY day. Then again at night you HAD to sit on the pea patch and get the deer, and on the corn rows to get the coons, and on the watermelon patch to get both of em. I think of all that good deer meat we were forced to eat because we had to shoot em off a patch of peas and it makes me want to cry. BECAUSE I ain't got a patch planted this year durn it!

:D

GoodOlBoy

[skeet]

I watched deer many times stomp on a watermelon and then eat the heart out of it..and go to another one with the coons followin along behind. Picked many tomatoes cause the Eastern Shore of Md where I grew up was the garden for Baltimore and Washington. Lots of canneries around back then too. Hated pickin cucumbers for pickles and was allergic mildly to tomatoes..but that weren't no nevermind as they said. Just had it to do. Those same canneries that used to be everywhere have almost all gone out of business or just closed. Farmers had too much work into picking all the crops. Now ya have to hire Mexicans or whatever and the gummit makes you provide housing that is better than a lot of farmers have. Too much regulation and it wasn't just caused by the gummit.. Liberal do gooders got involved. I remember all the infighting very well. If'n it hadn't been for the ACLU and other groups it may have stayed profitable to stay in truck crops. One farmer friend in Md quit growing because of gummit regulations 3 yrs ago..another one last year. The first grew sweet corn and squash and the other grew aparagus and sweet corn as well as potatoes.. The first put half his ground in the CReP program and rents the rest out to a grain farmer. The second is growing small grain and about 40 acres of edible soybeans for the Japs...but ya still use a combine on them. Sorry GOB..but ya can't go back and it just ain't gonna happen. :(

[fabsroman]

I just heard on the news that the price of groceries have gone up 65% because corn is being used for ethanol. They said that it is because the price of corn has gone up significantly over the past year. Only time will tell what is going to happen.

[skeet]

Groceries went up 65%?? Because of the price of corn? How ridiculous can they get? The price of any grown commodity such as corn or wheat or soybeans has such a small effect on the price of groceries it is unbelievable. The price of groceries is up because of the price of fuel and the wages that must be paid to get those groceries to market. Here it is again. The farmer is getting rich off of the consumer! Yeah, right. The farmer gets the least profit from the stuff he grows! The rest is all because of the middlemen. from grain brokers to the companies that make the product from the grain to the delivery (trucking etc) companies to the store selling the finished profit. How much do you all think the farmer gets from the cost of a loaf of bread? Half?? The farmer could only wish! More like 3-4 cents per loaf of bread goes to the farmer. The rest is all the other people who live off of the sale of the bread. :rolleyes: Oh well

[fabsroman]

Who knows how they came up with that number. They definitely didn't try to explain it. They just assume that we will take it as gospel. They did mention that the price of beef went up because the price of feed went up.

Also, who knows how the middlemen, etc. determine what they are going to sell something for. If a farmer is initially selling a bushel of corn for $1.00 and now he is selling it for $1.65 (i.e., a 65% increase), the middlemen and retailer might just tack on another percentage to that price to sell the item. Now, because the farmer raised his price by 65%, it will be passed along to the final product. On the other hand, if the middlemen, etc. use a fixed profit amount per item, then this is a lot of crap. However, who knows how they figured this out. All I know is that the 30 year mortgage rate average is at 6.75%, inflation is still on the rise, the FED is talking about possibly raising interest rates again to stop inflation, and investors are trembling.

[BILLY D.]

Originally posted by skeet
Groceries went up 65%?? Because of the price of corn? How ridiculous can they get? The price of any grown commodity such as corn or wheat or soybeans has such a small effect on the price of groceries it is unbelievable. The price of groceries is up because of the price of fuel and the wages that must be paid to get those groceries to market. Here it is again. The farmer is getting rich off of the consumer! Yeah, right. The farmer gets the least profit from the stuff he grows! The rest is all because of the middlemen. from grain brokers to the companies that make the product from the grain to the delivery (trucking etc) companies to the store selling the finished profit. How much do you all think the farmer gets from the cost of a loaf of bread? Half?? The farmer could only wish! More like 3-4 cents per loaf of bread goes to the farmer. The rest is all the other people who live off of the sale of the bread. :rolleyes: Oh well

skeet

My Father in law once explained this in very simple terms, he was neither an economist or a grain dealer. He said if you look at it in the terms of a box of wheat chex a bushel of wheat should be worth something in the $70>$80 range and that was back in the seventies. I looked at the milk futures the other day and whoa nellie, it will be 4>$5 a gallon before long.

One my vices in life is heavy cream in my coffee, that stuff is almost $7 a quart. Think I'll give it up, when hell freezes over.

You are right about the middleman, theres too many fingers in the soup. People here in the states are spoiled rotten when it comes to prices we pay for food. If the prices doubled or even trippled we still make out like bandits compared to the rest of the world. And who do we have to thank for that. THE AMERICAN FARMER.

We used to have the highest food standards in the world, but now that we have to feed 20 million illegals look at our food sources. Had to laugh the other day, a woman in town here bought a package of Banquet chicken and prepared it and was sitting there eating when she started investigating the piece of chicken she was chawing on and it turned out it was a head. She headed to the bathroom and blew lunch. Bought a few Oldsmobiles and Buicks.

I won't even eat out anymore unless it is an absolute necessity. Besides that I'm a smoker so I'm not allowed in those places.

Best wishes, Bill