|
|
|
| Authored by: artp on Saturday, December 01 2012 @ 12:23 AM EST |
Like someone with more than 25,000 acres, maybe?
There are no big ag producers. Yet. Iowa had a law against
corporations owning farm land, but that went the way of the
dodo when farm families needed to incorporate in order to
pass on farmland to the next generation without losing half
of it in capital gains taxes to the first generation.
You might be confusing the large corporations that supply or
buy from the various smaller farmers around the country with
the actual farmers who produce the crops. Since ag is a
captive industry, the suppliers and buyers can squeeze as
much as they want out of farmers. And they do.
The economy of ethanol (once you get past the benefits of
the initial 5%) is just not there. It has been popular in
Iowa because the state subsidizes it in order to make it
feasible. It doesn't make economic sense, nor does it make
energy conservation sense. You lose energy making ethanol.
Back in the late 70s/early 80s, when we were actually doing
research on these subjects, we determined that ethanol was
feasible from an energy standpoint for individual farmers
with their own ethanol stills using feedstocks from their
own farms. Transportation costs usually make ethanol silly
from an energy standpoint.
But then, it doesn't make any sense to run semis through
fields to pick up corn that is shipped to barges on the
Mississippi to huge ships that take it around the world,
either. Even before the drought this year that had barges
running half-empty.
Back in the late 1700s, farmers in Tennessee rebelled
because the government wanted to tax whiskey. But whiskey
was the best and cheapest way to export corn across the
Appalachians to the coast. Things haven't changed much at
all in the last 200+ years. We just need to find out what to
make instead of whiskey.
---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
