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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory

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To: Tommaso who wrote (93730)	4/22/2008 6:51:04 PM
From: Merlinson	Read Replies (3) of 110194

Is this a private fight or can anyone join in? LOL I agree basically with both of your posts. I think both shortage and speculation are at work here. I would like add something that I posted in Mish's group. Probably most of you have already seen it. I don't support the use of corn to make ethanol because of the prime farm land requirement and poor energy balance. I think there are better alternatives. However, I do think that the argument of food versus fuel neglects an important consideration which is the huge loss of nutritional value in turning grain into meat which reduces our ability to feed ourselves by a massive amount. Before the ethanol craze, about 85% of the corn grown in the U.S. went to feeding livestock, not people. Here is my other post: When corn is turned into ethanol, only the carbohydrates ( about 70% of the corn) are changed into alcohol by the yeast in fermentation. The vitamins, protein, and minerals remain in the distiller's grain that is left over. This stuff also has dead yeast in it. The yeast metabolize the carbohydrate into alcohol until it's about 12% at which point it kills them. Yeast is a very high quality protein, used in expensive weight gain powders. The distiller's grain is over 30% protein and 30% fiber, a really nutritious food. People can eat it but mostly farmers feed it to their cattle ( supplemented by hay) and other animals. The cattle gain more weight faster than when fed the original corn. If we fed it to people we would have a huge increase in available food and the ethanol too. Turning grain into meat has about a 5% return on food value, not a 5% loss, a 95% loss. So we would get about 20 times the return by not turning it into meat. But we like our steaks. ( No, I'm not a vegetarian, I like steak too. ) The question is: are we smarter than yeast?

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