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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (35497)	6/6/2008 10:39:14 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217805

RIP SUV! Long life ethanol flex cars! :-)

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (35497)	6/6/2008 3:00:37 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217805

Milk costs $3.93 for a gallon in NY. nydailynews.com Clean Air Act screws the gas consumer famr belill the milk consumer. What the Farm Bill Does for Dairy Submitted by Editor on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 11:18am. Steve Taylor N.H. Correspondent MONTPELIER, Vt. — A “feed cost adjuster” embedded in the 2008 Farm Bill at the insistence of U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Robert Casey (D-Pa.) is the most significant dairy policy development for Northeastern milk producers in years. Without the provision there would have been little to nothing in the way of beneficial change to the federal dairy pricing system which has seen farm gate milk prices lately swing wildly from 30-year lows in 2006 to record heights just a year later. That’s the consensus view of cooperative leaders, Extension specialists and many rank-and-file dairy farmers after Congress in May enacted a sweeping new Farm Bill over President George W. Bush’s veto, a measure that broadens federal support for nutrition, conservation and marketing programs but also continues with scant change in commodity support programs that had been the subject of unrelenting criticism from consumer groups, environmentalists and the media. The feed price adjuster provision will assure that the basic dairy safety net, the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program, will be continuously updated to reflect rising costs of producing milk, specifically the cost of feed. MILC came into being in 2002 after Northeastern and Southeastern dairy producer interests and state agriculture commissioners were unable to win Congressional approval for continuation and expansion of the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact. The Compact, which functioned from 1997 to 2001, generated premiums on Class I (table) milk sales for farmers whose milk was marketed in the six New England states. But heavy opposition to the Compact from Midwestern and Western states killed the initiative when it came up for renewal in Congress. In response, Sen. Leahy and other members of the Vermont congressional delegation at the time, Sen. James Jeffords and Rep. Bernard Sanders, gained support from midwestern politicians for a new program that would set a target price and provide payments to dairy producers from the federal treasury when the market price for farm milk fell below the target. Thus was born the MILC program, and its target price to trigger producer payments just happened to be the same $16.94 a hundredweight for Class I milk number that the old Dairy Compact had used. That $16.94 number lives on in the 2008 Farm Bill, but now it is going to be adjusted every month, thanks to the inclusion of the provision for the feed cost adjuster. Each month USDA will calculate the cost of feed for dairy farmers using the department’s long-standing milk-feed index, which draws on prevailing prices for corn, alfalfa hay and soy. This data will in turn go into a complex formula that will set the MILC target price and assure it keeps up with inflation in the cost of feeding dairy herds. The new Farm Bill also raises the volume of milk eligible for MILC assistance to 2.98 million pounds per year per farm from the old cap of 2.1 million, and provides that payments cover 45 percent of the spread between the deficiency and the target, up from the 34 percent level in the 2002 Farm Bill. According to Bob Wellington, senior vice president and chief economist for the Methuen, Mass.-based dairy cooperative Agri-Mark, the priority was to get the MILC program to kick in when Class I prices fell below the $19-20 level, and that goal has been met in the dairy language of the new Farm Bill. The Northeastern Federal Milk Marketing Order Class I price for May came in at $19.87, with June’s projected to be $20.91. Wellington sees Class I prices moving up to as high as $24.88 by fall, which will result in blend prices in the $22 range. “If farmers can get a blend of over $20 they can cover their costs in this environment,” he says. Economic projections generated by Wellington through the end of 2009 show prices remaining high enough that they won’t trigger any MILC payments during that 18-month period. He notes that milk production in the Northeastern marketing area currently is up slightly, but marketers are having difficulty finding homes for all the region’s milk because a number of receiving plants have recently ceased operations. Agri-Mark’s West Springfield, Mass., butter and powder plant, a major market-balancing facility for New England and New York, is currently running flat-out and has had to turn away loads of non-Agri-Mark-member milk in recent weeks. Sen. Leahy and his fellow Vermont lawmakers in Washington, now-Sen. Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch, have received lavish bipartisan praise back home for their efforts to tie MILC’s safety net provisions to the cost of production on the farm. Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas said he was “very pleased with the efforts of Vermont’s congressional delegation to keep pressure on Farm Bill negotiators to include the feed cost adjuster amendment.” It will protect farmers “when they need it most,” he added.

To: Joe S Pack who wrote (35497)	6/9/2008 10:27:53 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217805

Mining the cities fo metals. They just built a new soccer stadium in Toronto, Canada, with lovely aluminum bleachers; before the stadium even opened, someone unbolted the seats and carried them away. In Scotland, the "Great Drain Robbery" involves shipping manhole covers to China. In India, eight people have died, falling into open manholes after their covers were stolen. In Baltimore, thieves cut down and carted away 136 aluminum lamp posts. In California thieves can remove a platinum-filled catalytic converter in ninety seconds. Copper? Stealing it is a growth industry all over the world, as it hits four bucks a pound- two years ago it was a buck and a quarter. While a manhole might fetch just $20, a single catalytic converter, boosted from an SUV, is a metals trifecta. It contains platinum, palladium, and rhodium worth $150. For professional thieves the big hauls, like truckloads of copper wire pilfered from construction sites, can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars. U.S. scrap metal has grown into a $61 billion business - from $40 billion in 1995 - and the second-largest U.S. export to China last year.