A disaster in the making!

A friend is a senior guy at a large New England brewery... they've been absorbing costs all over the place - distrubution costs are up, natural gas is freakishly expensive, barley hasn't helped and now the "hop problem".

You know what is scary? Look at the margins on beer. Unless you can pump out macroswill like Bud (says the beer snob drinking a High Life as we speak) that is adjuncted out to hell with rice and corn, some operations barely clear 2% in a good year.

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
IMHO, the only reason we haven't seen huge price increases across the board is the weakness in the housing market and the increased cost of money have left folks with less disposable income - ergo, demand is lower making price increases harder to stick.
 
"Barley and wheat prices have skyrocketed as more farmers plant corn to meet increasing demand for ethanol, while others plant feed crops to replace acres lost to corn."

Damn - another reason why we should burn fossil fuels and not waste our corn and crop land on non-food (or beverage:)) products.
 
nddons said:
"Barley and wheat prices have skyrocketed as more farmers plant corn to meet increasing demand for ethanol, while others plant feed crops to replace acres lost to corn."

Damn - another reason why we should burn fossil fuels and not waste our corn and crop land on non-food (or beverage:)) products.
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Actually I agree with you. I am a nobody with no formal education on ethanol and economics, but even my idiot-arsed self KNEW that it as a freaking insanely STUPID AND MORONIC move to try and replace our "go juice" with something that directly competes with our food supply.

Sometimes the free-market does suck, and this is a prime example. People are replacing those crops because it means more $$$$, and in the mean time the supply of actual food items is less, thus driving up the cost. Yeah...that is a brilliant move. :rolleyes:
 
To me, what is most distressing is that corn-based ethanol has no advantages; it costs too much (in both energy and money) to produce and handle, it is harmful to a very large proportion of the motor vehicle fleet, and (as noted above) its increased use has caused unprecedented competition for the food and feed corn market.

As usual, follow the bad government policy and its money trail: if the use of ethanol in motor fuel were not mandated by congress, would it be in use to anything close to the extent it is? The answer, inevitably, is "no."
 
smigaldi said:
Oh the humanity!!
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History will not look favorably on us as we start to burn our food.

"Burn food!" would be a horrible slogan.

I'm also an uneducated nobody but it seems to me that we should simply plant switchgrass on every highway green space and save the farmland for food. If you're going to water the highway you might as well get something back.
 
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