RE: Don't Get Carried Away

The corn we eat (colloquially referred to as "sweet corn") is different from "field corn", and you are right that it is used for animal feed. However, it is also used for human consumption as corn sweetener, corn starch, corn meal (like in tortillas), etc.

Yeah, meat prices are pretty high. However, to this point I really have a tough time getting excited about this. The farmers get a tiny fraction of the money from the food you buy and now that the raw material is more valuable, they are getting more of the proceeds. I really haven't heard anything quantifiable about how this is adversely affecting the poor in the US (many of whom get food stamps), but I had seen an article about how this is driving up food prices in Mexico beyond the reach of some of their people who buy the corn to make tortillas. That said, there is a lot of room for improvement in agricultural practices worldwide, and rising food prices would be a good incentive for them to make those reforms rather than the system of perpetual protectionist systems that encourage inefficiency.

All of that is beside the point anyway because clearly we want to move on to cellulostic ethanol (or I would like to jump straight to cellulostic BUTANOL) and bio-diesel.

I'm not totally certain that CRP is connected with ethanol or wetlands. There was a lot of land set fallow to artificially reduce production and allow the land to recover, but some states also had a separate wetland recovery program. On that point I wholly agree.

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