Oh man… Where do I start? I could type pages and not get everything said.
Burning corn for heat was a bad idea at 2-dollar corn, and now at $7.oo it’s idiotic. In reality, growing your own on 8-acres would probably cost you more than just buying the stuff. Figure the cost of equipment, maintenance on equipment, fuel, seed, fertilizer, drying, storage, crop insurance (yeah, if you’re gonna’ lay out that kind of cash to plant it, you damn well better insure it), and even the potential loss of income from the land (‘cause you’re burning the crop, rather than selling it). It takes a lot more land than 8-acres to make it work. And you live in Northern Wisconsin… man, ol’ Mother Nature is gonna’ do everything she can to screw with ya’. A cold, wet spell shortly after planting and you loose the crop… insurance may pay expenses, but it may be too late for replanting. Hail? Ever see what hail can do to an emerging corn crop? A hot, dry spell just as the ears are forming equals small ears with small kernels. And then there are those early, cool, wet autumns… when the corn has no chance to dry on-the-stalk, even starts to mold on the ear. Do you have any idea how many gallons of LP a corn dryer will use in a 24-hour period? Do you even have a corn dryer? How ‘bout an early, wet, snowy winter… like an early blizzard before you can get your corn harvested? Now you have 10-inches of snow on top of 12-inches of mud in your corn field… How you gonna’ get that corn out?
Why was burning corn for heat at 2-dollars a bad idea? Corn and soy beans are our food source… plain and simple. More than corn flakes, those grains are used for tons of purposes along the food chain, such as feeding all forms of livestock, fertilizers, even plastics and rubbers used for equipment parts… just to name a small few. So now we add to the demand, using it to make motor fuel (ethanol) and burn it for heat… driving the price up to 7-dollars. To keep up with demand farmers are growing more corn and less beans, which drives up the price of beans and requires more fertilizer because of the lack of crop rotation. As the price of those grains rise, the price of near everything else in this country follows… from the grocery store to the fuel pump, and even the carpet on your floor. And our not-so-wise politicians’ are dumping billions of tax-payer dollars into this idiocy. If you think the housing bubble was a fiasco… just wait. It ain’t just the farmers that will get hurt… we’re all gonna’ pay a huge price for this stupidity.
We keep this crap up and we could be the first nation in history to starve because we literally burned our food source!!!!
