Dr. TILMAN: Corn is a major source of food for the U.S. and the world.
The reason is that corn is over 3X as productive per acre as soy.
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She is likewise bullish on wheat and soybeans, though corn is more favorably priced, she says.
She is bullish on wheat and soybeans, though corn is more favorably priced, she says.
For the first time ever, more corn is devoted to the fuel than to livestock.
Most are in the Midwest, close to where the corn is grown and processed.
Corn is what feeds the chickens, the pigs, the cattle - that gives us much of our meat.
The huge, dried kernels will crack your teeth, so for use in cooking, dried corn is usually ground first.
U.S. corn is central to its strategy, where it says it will offer more products at more price points.
It goes without saying that resources are limited in our recession-ravaged economies ... but disinvesting in seed corn is obviously self-defeating.
Today already we see that corn prices have doubled and that a lot of the corn is going into the fuel side.
This corn is resistant to corn borer, root worm and herbicide infection.
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The price of corn is pivotal in the world food equation, and food markets are on edge because U.S. corn stocks are plummeting.
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An immutable fact is now clear for all to see: Food prices track oil prices, regardless of how much corn is used for ethanol production.
As we all know if you subsidise something you get more of it and thus more corn is grown that Americans actually want to eat.
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Investors in grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland ( ADM) think corn is king.
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But since corn is used to feed livestock, any increase in its price will also cause the price of beef, pork, poultry and dairy products to rise.
Since corn is not a natural part of a cow's diet, cattle fed on it may experience stress and other ailments, so they are routinely treated with antibiotics.
Because corn is increasingly used for ethanol production, it has decoupled from historical livestock cycles and changed the margin relationship between feed costs and the sale of livestock products.
Corn, he concedes, is an energy-intensive crop, but Tumbleson says he may be better off than wheat or soybean farmers because corn is in just about everything we eat.
The price of corn is a critical variable in the world food equation, and food markets are on edge because U.S. corn stocks are plummeting due to the ethanol mandate.
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Corn is indeed a renewable resource, but it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than either biodiesel (such as soybean oil) or ethanol from other plants.
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Demand for corn is such that more land is also being ploughed up in drier regions of the Great Plains states to the west of the corn belt, where irrigation in required, increasing water demand further.
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Gore's "mistake" was a whopper: Corn is a poor substrate for ethanol production because it takes a lot of conventional fossil energy to grow and ferment it, and its diversion to ethanol production creates a conflict between two of our most fundamental needs--food and energy.
The drawdown of corn inventories is due to huge U.S. government subsidies of corn-derived ethanol.
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