What a crock!

"What a crock: Blaming biofuels for food prices ignores reality." That is the title for an article in Western Farm Press. The article is quite good, and the title cracked me up! I think that biggest thing here is people ignoring reality! Everyone wants to cry wolf on ethanol raising food prices, but no one wants to take a look at the real data of whats really happening in our markets. So let us look at what happened in 2007 with corn....in 2007 U.S. farmers produced a record 13.1 billion bushels of corn, 22% of which was used for ethanol.

Still, there was enough left to meet domestic needs, achieve record exports, and have a 10 % surplus. What?!? Did I just write surplus? Had not a single bushel of corn gone to ethanol, food prices would still have risen because of the tremendous burden of $100-plus oil, burgeoning world demand for grains, and crop failures due to drought and other disasters.

And speaking of burdens, this afternoon Jason and I were figuring our input costs for our wheat this year. When we came to fertilizer, Jason said that a particular kind that we used we had purchased at roughly $500 per ton, and now it is over $1000 per ton. Unbelievable! I hate to beat a dead horse, but......crude oil again plays a mighty big factor in our food prices.

If you like imported oil......you're going to love imported food!