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

[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!!! Think of all the money you will save..so ya can spend it on shootin..or cigarettes or somethin else more important

[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

[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!



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 , 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! 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!

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

[skeet]

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

[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