Pacific Coast Canola, about 17 miles southeast of Moses Lake, Wash., is testing and commissioning its crushing equipment. The manager of a new canola oil production plant hopes the facility will reach full production capacity early in 2013.
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Harvested canola acreage jumped dramatically this fall throughout the Pacific Northwest, doubling in Idaho, according to USDA. Canola is used as a high-protein feed that bolsters milk production of dairy cows, a biofuel and a culinary oil.
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Waiving the Renewable Fuel Standard could reduce corn prices by as much as $1.30 a bushel or not at all, according to an analysis by the Farm Foundation and economists at Purdue University.
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A Capital Press article on camelina garners a mention today on Biofuels Digest. The post provides a link to the original Capital Press article by freelancer Terence Day.
The Capital Press also gets a mention (but no link) in the Storm Exchange's Stormwire blog. The post is about wheat harvest running behind schedule in Idaho due to weather earlier in the season (see staffer Patricia McCoy's story here).
Freakonomics, an economics blog on the New York Times, has an interview with University of California-Davis agricultural economist Daniel Sumner. Some of the reader-supplied questions are a little off the wall (one reader wants the government to require every American to garden), but it's still fascinating. To sum up, he says biofuel mandates have significantly increased the cost of food, organic food is great for the rich but not for average consumers, local isn't always good for the environment, and he's no fan of farm subsidies:This rationale, or rationalization, for farm subsidies makes no sense. Farming is a long-run business and there is no reason to think the government is better at regulating the markets for farm commodities than are the farmers and other who are in the business and have strong incentives to use storage, forward pricing, lines of credit, and the like to deal with commodity markets.
So, it goes to reason that if crop prices go up, that should be a good thing for agriculture. But a couple of news items this morning leave me wondering.
One story from Associated Press came from yesterday's earnings report from Tyson Foods. Tyson was reporting their third consecutive quarterly loss. The reason, in part, was blamed on higher corn prices. The chickens and cows that become the foods in Tyson Foods are costing more to feed, which is likely to mean it's going to cost consumers more to feed their families.
Why? Corn liquor. Or more accurately, corn fuel. Ethanol. Increased demand for ethanol is contributing to a 10-year high in price for corn.
But on the flip side of the supply-demand ledger, fewer people are eating meat. So, Tyson says it's paying more and selling less.
So while Midwest corn growers may be in hog heaven, cattle and poultry ranchers may not be quite so happy.
You know who is happy? The folks who do seem to be making money in the confusing economic morass are those on Wall Street. In a story broadcast this morning (click here for a link to the video on today.msnbc.com) on the Today show from CNBC, the five largest Wall Street firms alone will pay out $36 billion in bonuses this year, which would set a new record. The bonus bonanza is attributed to a robust and rejuvenated stock market. It will eclipse the record set in 2005 when $21.5 billion in bonus cash was awarded.
So, how many farmers and ranchers out there, who produce the raw materials for the American economy, are having all-time record grown when also absorbing higher fuel and fertilizer costs, higher wage costs and other rising expenses?
It's something to chew on.
Agriculture
Food prices
Ethanol
Wall Street
Economics
Profits
It's production day here at Capital Press, and we are putting the finishing touches on this week's editions fo the newspaper, but I wanted to make a quick post.
I noticed there is a blog about biodiesel listed in Blogger's "Blogs of Note" section, so I've added it onto the links for this site.
Biodiesel is sure a hot topic right now, but I'm not quite sure what makes this particular blog, called "All Things Biodiesel" a blog of note. As of this writing, the site hasn't been updated in more than two weeks.
So, it may be worthy of note to Blogger, but the posts appear pretty sporadic.
But with all the buzz about biofuels in general, and biodiesel in particular, I thought you might be interested nonetheless.
Agriculture
Biodiesel
Biofuels
Blogging
I'm going to try to squeeze in a quick post here. Blogger has a scheduled outage pending here shortly, so I won't get too carried away. I just wanted to say sorry there haven't been posts in a few days. I had the opportunity to take a few days off last weeks, so I grabbed at it.
And I was fortunate to time those days off with some of the best weather the Willamette Valley has had in a while.
One other oddity cropped up today when reviewing visitors stats for our capitalpress.com website. It seems a story over there about farmers making their own biodiesel has been pretty popular. So far this month, that article has been printed 4,627 times. So either a lot of people are interested in that topic, or someone is printing out enough copies to mail them to all their friends, family, customers, vendors and anyone else who passes by.
More later.
Agriculture
Biodiesel
Vacation
