True but just about anything that grows can be fermented and made to produce ethanol. Probably one of the best crops for producing ethanol is sugar beets. They will grow almost anywhere and don't require the care given to corn.

As I posted earlier oil seed crops are another source of ethanol. Once the oil is extracted the remaining pulp can be placed in a fermentation unit and actually produces ethanol more quickly than the same seed before the oil extraction.

I wonder about cottonseed oil, there are mountains of cottonseed around every gin in the area after the harvest each year.

 

Right you are!

I misspoke (as they said about Regan whenever he was caught in a lie.)

And [img]customavatars/avatar148317_0.gif[/img] Phydeaux88 Brazil has done it with sugar cane, which will grow very well on our gulf coast and Florida.

 

True sugarcane will grow on the gulf coast but that is a relatively small area already heavily cultivated. Sugar Beets will grow almost anywhere including Northern states like Montana and Idaho.

 

No argument there, but I think we need to utilize all the different sources until we are up and running and settle on what works the best.

 

Don't forget Michigan grows sugar beets.

 

They grow in many places from Michigan to California's Imperial Valley. With irrigation they could be grown in many areas that are not currently used to grow any crops all it will take is high enough demand to make cultivation economically practical.

BTW in the production of ethanol you use the whole plant not just the beet.

As for as other crops ethanol can be made from the part of the plant not normally harvested such as corn stalks.

The change to bio fuels is late coming and should be aggressively pursued. Even if we only replace half of the petro based fuel with bio that will have a major impact on our balance of trade and will negatively impact the pocket books of some folks that have so much money they find it necessary to fund mischief around the world.

 

The change to bio fuels is late coming and should be aggressively pursued. Even if we only replace half of the petro based fuel with bio that will have a major impact on our balance of trade and will negatively impact the pocket books of some folks that have so much money they find it necessary to fund mischief around the world.[/QUOTE]

BRAVO TO THAT!!

Impoverish those who hate us and create a mass of new jobs and a boom in our agriculture industy!

 

NA7.3LIDI, you're a sophmore in high school too? Rock on dude!

I think you guys are right. If we had stuck with our alternate fuels program from the Carter years (I know, before I was born), then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. But that's getting political, so I won't touch that. Biodiesel, I'm almost 100%positive, is gonna' be a major player for America in the future.

I'm glad to see this has been a productive thread. FTE rules.

 

Just to add, farmers acutally farming again, could spark a boom in manufacturing that we have lost so much of the last 10 years to overseas competitors. New tractors, implements, ect. ect. New bio-diesel and ethanol refineries, again more jobs, construction and operational. Seems simple doesn't it? Why can't the govenrment figure it out?


Ryan

 

We need to be in their faces at every opportunity and yell the obvious to them. Write letters to the editor in every paper and magazine. I'm doing it.
email your congressperson and senators. Better yet, a letter carries more weight.

 

Thats simple, lobbyist. And no not oil company lobbyist believe it or not. It's the farming industry lobbyist that push for things like set aside, and crp land. When I was still farming, and a active member of farm bureau, you should see how protective these people are of things like the CRP and other farm programs, in a meeting I was involved in I mentioned why the set aside type programs are bad for this country and farming in general and about got run out of town on a rail litterly. The biggest problem is there is now an entire generation of older farmers that are now making a good living off thier land without working it and thus retiring on payments from the goverment, and they don't have ot move to town or sell the land to retire, and more and more are doing just exactly that making hte land unavailable for younger farmers to have a chance to begin a life of farming, and touching that programs is almost worse than a politician standing up and saying that social security needs to be abolished expecially since it's the same groupl he would be affecting so you get the point.

 

In the last 15 years I have seen in our neighborhood a lot of medium size farms either go under or sell out due to the high prices for seed corn ($100 per bag), fertilizer ($296 per ton) NH3 ($500 per ton), land rent ($110). The economics primarly dictate and the farm programs only put in place a bottom price. This last year the cash corn price at harvest was $1.45 per dry bushel. drying corn in this area runs normally 30-60 cents per bushel. So without farm programs a lot more medium sized farms would go out of business.

 

Funny that sounds exactly like the excuse they used up at farm bureau for why we can't do away with farm programs, well all I can say is WRONG. Farmers made money for years without farm programs, they are nothing more than welfare and the people that make out hte best are not the medium size farms, it's the high dollar rich grain farmers in places like northern Iowa that now can afford to buy 5-8000 acres places at over $2000/acre. I will tell ya what I raised sheep back in the mid 90s when they did away with the wool incentive, and the same excuses for not doing it were put forth, basically a lot of small and medium sized farms would go under, well the goverment did away with it anyway and guess what, I had the highest profit year I have ever had the next year, yes thats right I made MORE money when the goverment got out of it.
The only people that would be hurt by the reduction of farm subsidies are the rich huge farmers, I know one family that farms a lot of acres and recieves over half a million per year from the goverment, heck at that they can afford to lose money on the corn and still make out like a fat rat.
And why is land rent so high? easy there is several MILLION acres of land in set aside, and crp that we the tax payers are paying anywhere from 70-120 per acre to keep it out of production, thus lowering the amount of land available to rent and farm thus driving the price of rent on the farm ground up, and putting small and medium sized farms into a less than profitable situation. See the corrolation here? The farm programs are making it more expensive to farm for the little guys and making the big farmers richer and richer at tax payer expense.
Another thing. People worry about not having enough farm ground to supply the corn, soybeans or other crops for alternative renewable fuels, well the cure for that is another easy one. Put a moritorium on urban sprawl. Just in the past 15 yrs in west DesMoines area the urban sprawl has taken by my calculation approx 10,000 acres of farm ground out of production, just so some uppity types can live in thier fancy house and have a fancy 18 hole golf coarse to play on with a high dollar shopping mall across the way to shop in. and that is just one little side of a middle sized city in the midwest. It is my understanding that urban sprawl is taking tens of thousands of acres of farm ground out of production every year, well we force people to recycle everything else why not recycle land, there are places in and around every city that is run down old factories and warehouses that are sitting empty how about forcing these developers to reclaim that land and build new houses on it instead.
Take the west DesMoines example 10,000 acres of marginal land producing 120 bushels to the acre (and most of that land was better than marginal) that means they have now taken land that would have produced 1.2 million bushels of corn that could have been used to produce ethonal, and it goes on. I was just in grinnell IA today they are putting up new hotels, and gas stations along hte freeway taken another couple hundred acres out, same thing in Newton where they are putting a new race truck up on farm ground that is GOOD farm ground that probably produced 160 bushell.

 

Right on MB, I have been yelling for years that the govt needs to be entirely out of the farming industry. The market can take care of itself. If we create the demand for oil and ethanol producing crops, in a free market, the savvy farmers, the ones with the spirit and technological expertise will find a way to meet that demand.

I expect that we will soon be discovering a number of suitable crops that will deliver the fuel. The only obstacle I see is having an adequate supply of water, not land. I think that the 'lack of land' problem is propaganda.

We need to downsize the federal govt. Do away with income taxes in favor of a sales tax as the sole source of income for the federal govt because when we don't like the way they are spending our money we can stop buying and delay remitting, which is the kind of power that the people in this country now lack. And imprison legislators who spend more of our money than has been collected. They have too much power. Too many subsidies, too many tax concessions. We need to take those kinds of things away from them. A simple fair tax system that will pay for basic govt functions and no more. We would prosper as individuals and as a nation.