M I C… cee-ya in the unemployment line, hah hah!
K E Y… Y? Because you can Donald-Duck yourselves. We need the big paychecks for the imagineers, who come up with creative masterstrokes like “Hey, let’s buy the Simpsons.”
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We live in a rural area, traveled by folks heading to a ritzy weekend resort area. We laugh at all the times we see Mercedes and BMW’s pulled over along the road, stealing feed corn from the adjacent cornfield. Trust me, that ain’t no sweet corn.
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Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn , plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens).
Of wheat grown in the United States , 36% percent is consumed domestically by humans , 50% is exported, 10% is used for livestock feed, and 4% is used for seedlings.
The second largest market for U.S. soybeans is for production of foods for human consumption , like salad oil or frying oil, which uses about 15 percent of U.S. soybeans . (Livestock consume 70% of soybeans grown in the US)
So, 24% of the corn, 36% of the wheat and 15% of soybeans grown in this country are consumed by US citizens. The rest is fed to livestock (especially corn and soybeans) or exported. US farmers don’t “feed the world”, they mostly feed livestock and ethanol plants (which essentially convert oil to ethanol with almost no net energy gain). In developing countries, women grow most of the food used for consumption, which does not get counted in total food production numbers. They can’t afford commodities grown in the US in any case. The US farmers “feeding the world” is a crock.
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When I was detasseling corn in the misspent summers of my youth, we would never bother with the 10 rows closest to the road, because the farmer planted some other varietal there.
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Only about 2% of ethanol corn is net fossil fuel positive, when you account for the fertilizer (originated from crude oil) and water transport costs. The goal of ethanol was gasoline independence, not energy efficiency.
Time to plant a Victory Garden.
Added Reynolds, most of those the Tyson employees were Hispanic immigrants, many illegals.The ones who aren’t illegal vote Democrat, so they are getting what the deserve.
I’m careful about what I feed my dogs, and would never feed them most of the food out there sold to people. (I don’t eat it either).
But we do get lots of food from overseas. I don’t think you realize how much of the food in your local chain store is from China, and of course Mexico. Not so applicable now, but before C-19 you wouldn’t have much of a variety buying only food grown in the US.
That was my high school job - detasseling corn. Hot, hard, long hours, but at that time the only paying job minors could get in the summer.
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I know we import food…note that I said food aid, not just food. That’s different…and, I wonder what is happening with food production and distribution worldwide, I haven’t seen anything about that. They are already predicting world hunger is going to double to something like 280 million people this year, so there must be some disturbances in the distribution system already.
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And meat-packing workers.
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A few years ago in my home town a meat-packing employee went into a “meat sorting” machine to clean it out and was killed when another employee switched it on. The guy was 72 years old. The company was eventually fined around $50k for safety violations, and then appealed that ruling. There’s just a lot wrong with all of that.
https://hanfordsentinel.com/news/local/meat-plant-cited-for-violations-in-worker-s-death/article_c44e2724-1c3e-11e1-a825-001cc4c03286.html
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