Drought spells beginning of the end for corn ethanol?

[Lore]

There are certainly vegan protein substitutes. Although I doubt very much that crops of field corn will be turned into sources higher in protein to feed the world. Much of the land, education and machinery is geared to the selective monoculture production of specific crops. Without a source of fish, pork, beef, chicken, etc., it will be much tougher in a world under a food security threat to obtain the calories needed to sustain a healthy life. Look for a return of the great famines of India to visit us once again.

While the US population can live with a 40% reduction in yields, for a while, the rest of world cannot.

[dohboi]

I have a small family farm in NW Arkansas. Our county has been hit the hardest in the state. My field and back yard look something like the desert. The only green spot on my 5 acres is where the septic sytem lines are. Grain prices are going up .25cents a week, 1 month ago it was $8.80 a bag and last week it was up to $10.05. My garden totally failed because of no rain and I can not water because if I do the well runs out of water after about 40 minutes. The grasshoppers and locusts are of biblical proportions. They ate a 30 ft long row of green beans down to sticks over night just when they were starting to produce.. Needless to say the 5 quarts of green beans I put up won’t last my family of 5 for a year. The bugs stripped cabbages to the core and brussel sprouts down to the stem. I got 4 ears of corn out of 6– 65ft rows The only thing that did well was my onions and potatoes. It got too hot, too dry, too fast… The farms around me grow for the canning companies and none of the soybeans, corn, wheat or green beans did anything. Nobody has hay for their beasties and I am having to pay $17 a bale for small square bales that are being shipped from out of state. Normally we would get 3 cuttings of hay from our pastures and this year we were lucky to get 1… While they say 5% increase well just for example look at McDonalds. Their $1 McDouble is now $1.19 now when I went to school that was a 19% increase and it happened overnight. Not a nickel at a time. You could get hamburger on sale for $2 a pound and now you are lucky to get it on sale for $3 a pound. That is a 50% increase. NOBODY is going to tell me it is just a little drought!!!

From A Close-Up Look at the 2012 Drought

[Pops]

OUch!
USDA corn forecast is 10.7B bu, a 6 year low.
Corn jumped to $8.50 and USDA says it could go to $8.90/bu

[dinopello]

This is a bit off topic, but these systems are all interdependent and should we allow the water to go to the highest bidder, this could get 'interesting' over time.

Oil companies desperately seek water amid Kansas drought

Oil companies drilling in the drought-ridden fields of southern Kansas are taking desperate measures to get the water they need to tap into the state's oil reserves.

Huge amounts of water are required to extract oil, especially when companies use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which requires millions of gallons of water to crack the shale rock and bring oil to the surface.

Some companies are paying farmers for any remaining water they have left in their ponds, drilling their own water wells, digging ponds next to streams or trucking in water from as far away as Pennsylvania -- all of which is costing them a handsome sum of money and time.

To the oil companies, it's worth it. With oil prices hovering around $90 a barrel and the cost to produce a barrel of oil only around $15, the profits are huge, said Gordon, whose company is still aggressively leasing mineral rights, which gives it rights to drill on certain properties.

[Pops]

Turns out prices for sept actually fell today by 18¢ to $8.00 and feeder cattle rose some, yea haw.
--

Yeah Dino, the leakier the XL pipe is the better for drillers. :^\

[Keith_McClary]

The Drought and the Biofuels Disasterby ROBERT BRYCE

America ’s corn ethanol sector now consumes about as much grain as all of this country’s livestock. About 4.6 billion bushels of corn will be used for livestock feed this year. Thus, American motorists are now burning about as much corn in their cars as is fed to all of the country’s chickens, turkeys, cattle, pigs, and fish combined.

Need another comparison? This year, the American automobile fleet will consume about twice as much corn as is grown in the entire European Union. Put another way, the U.S. ethanol sector will burn almost as much corn as is produced by Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and India combined.

Need another comparison? This year, the U.S. is now using about 13 percent of global corn production—that’s about 4.6 percent of all global grain production—so that it can produce a quantity of ethanol that contains the energy equivalent of about seven-tenths of one percent of global oil needs.

[dohboi]

Nice string of stats. From what I hear, even in non-drought years, many rural communities were worried about how much local water ethanol operations were gobbling up. In this extreme drought year, it must be even worse.

I just heard a plant ceased operations in southern Minnesota.

[ritter]

Growing corn powered by oil to make ethanol to put in our gas tanks never made much sense to me.