Corn and food, and some other corn issues.

 

Corn is a multi use grain, a feedstock we should not underutilize. To label it as if it were only used for food is dishonest.

Back fifty years ago, we used to throw whole corn ears over the fence to our hogs. I did so. With our modern technologies that we now use to derive thousands of products from corn, it is really becoming unethical and immoral to not process corn for best uses. This means processing it for all of the foods, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals. vitamins, nutriceuticals, cosmetics, home chemicals, industrial chemicals, plastics, and a dozen kinds of fuels that corn has inside that kernel.

All of these products come from each kernel of corn. It is not a simple question of either fuel or food, we produce both. One hundred percent of our corn should be processed for best uses.

If we actually do have a disastrous American corn shortage some year, it hasnt happened yet but theoretically it is possible; much better to be producing enough corn for all corn markets. Then in an emergency it would be simple to switch to more food and less of the thousands of less critical non food products in corn like cosmetics or plastics.

If we were only growing enough corn for food, and we had a crop shortage, we would not have that safety net supply of corn grown for other uses that could be re-directed to food. Having thousands of uses for corn actually increases our food supply stability, not decreasing it as some like to proclaim.

Concerning land use. In the United States, We currently pay famers billions of dollars to not grow crops on 30 million acres of farm land. This was 40 million acres, until the Age of BioTechnology came along and we developed more markets for our crops.

The reason for this subsidy to not grow more crops is that if we grow too much of a crop like corn and world markets collapse, to prices below the cost of growing it, we will bankrupt millions of farmers world wide.

This happened in Mexico, and we were not even selling corn below the American cost of production. When NAFTA opened up the Mexican corn market for American corn. We flooded the Mexican market with corn that was below the Mexican farmers cost of production; the Mexican farmers could not compete on price, and thousands went broke.

This actually led to riots over a lack of taco shells. We had disrupted a hundred years of local Mexican farm to market corn marketing, and many small taco factories could not buy corn in the quantities they needed. They could buy a whole truck load of American corn cheap, but a just few bushels that they needed to buy locally from local farmers, not available.

As we continue to develop world corn bio product markets, more land will be returned to productive use. the US federal subsidy to not grow crops will continue to decrease.

Of course, the anthropogenic climate change theory is a hoax. We have always had climate change and always will. This is the way of the the universe. Nothing we can do to stop it, nor should we try. 

The Anthropogenic climate change hoax is being pushed because a lot of people are getting rich from it. Others, like politicians, are finding it to be a path to power.

The risk is that they might actually figure out how to effect manmade climate change. This is probably the greatest risk to life on earth today; not nuclear war, not world hunger, but pseudo scientists playing games with our climate.