First off, I think some misinterpret the not so rosy view of ethanol as taking a shot at corn growers. Not so. I'm glad the corn guys had some good years, like I've said repeatedly, I hope they paid ff everything they could. But those great years for corn were lousy years for the rest of us that had to buy corn. Pork, beef, poultry, lamb, etc. We all have to pay a lot more now because corn was so high. And lets not kid ourselves, the bushel price may have dropped to $4.00, but the feed store price is still running about $18.00@cwt up here. There's a lot of middlemen working to get themselves out of holes, pay their taxes, fuel, etc. too that goes into the price. That's above and beyond the ethanol issue.
As to why fuel is so high? Consider that since 1990 our dollar has lost 80% of it's value. 10% in the last 2 years. Purposeful devaluation of the dollar is part of why fuel is still high. Oil is bought and sold on the world market, we pay what everyone else does with a devalued dollar. Plus, the oil companies have to pay for that ethanol the govt mandates, the research, the shipping, the exploration, etc. Yeah, they get tax breaks just like any other company, but lets not try to say big oil is getting breaks and big ethanol isn't. That's not even close to real.
In the end, if ethanol plays out for a good while longer, that's great for the corn guys. Pay your debt now. If not, if switch grass or kudzu or (I wish) pig weed and dandelion are the next big thing, then it's going to happen. Meanwhile that lovely brewers grain that was mentioned early on is obscenely expensive no matter how good it is, and thats before you truck it. Corn is going to remain relatively high (above $16.00@cwt) according to my feed guy for the foreseeable future. He'd LOVE to be able to get $4.00 corn, but it's just not available in a reasonable distance and there's no one stepping up to get a train load around here. So all us smaller dairy, hog, poultry, sheep, etc guys that can't buy tons and tons at a time are going to be stuck with the dirty end of the stick for some time and so will the consumer that's looking at $16.00@lbs steaks for the good stuff. I don't know about you, but we eat a lot of raman noodle soup and cheap Holstein burger.
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Today's Featured Article - Tractor Generators - by Chris Pratt. As a companion to the articles on three-brush and two-brush generators, it seemed fitting that we should provide our readers with a description of how a generator works in lay terms. The difficulty with all those "theory of operation" texts is that they border on principles of electricity or physics and such. Since I know nothing of either, you will have to put up with looking at the common sense side of how generators work which means we "
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