Adjust your metaphors. Chicken feed is now expensive. Pilgrim's Pride, the world's largest chicken processor is laying off 1,100 people due to the rising cost of corn. [CNNMoney]
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Burning food for fuel is patently absurd. Ban corn-based ethanol.
Actually, I have it on good authority that this isn't because of rising corn costs but because of poor managment and bad financial decisions prior to rising costs.
@MissTic:
Which might apply in this situation, but still doesn't discount that the price of corn is skyrocketing.
Mismanagement may be the excuse here, but corn subsidies are causing prices to rise (except in the beef industry, where farmers are selling off their beef as quickly as possible, rather than for most money, so they can get in on the corn gravy train.)
If ethanol were truly a viable option, it wouldn't need heavy subsidation and artificial pricing to get its foot in the door.
^true, corn is rising. There have been mergers and acquisitions and decisions made that would have been the downfall anyway. Rising corn costs hastened it.
forgot to add, you can kind of read between the lines on their website under "investor relations" - "chairman's message".
It's all about greed. Anyway someone can make lots of money, they will do it. Corn will be the new oil.
wouldn't hold my breath to see a senator or representative actually vote down agriculture subsidies.
Forget the recession, get ready to stand in line for $300 loaves of bread!(At least the house prices will seem to level out when the dollar is worthless)
The definition of irony: American famers jumping the border to work on Mexican corn farms.
Ah, corn subsidies. First, you bring us the horrors of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, then you give us the most expensive, inefficient ethanol process imaginable -- so bad that it actually wastes arable land and drives up the price of feed. Is there anything you can't do?
If we ended the heavy corn subsidies, maybe people would start making ethanol out of high-sugar items, like sugar beets, which would be more efficient by several orders of magnitude. And maybe we could also get a decent soda. Not like it'll ever happen though.
Industrial farms like ADM will continue to drive commodity prices skyward. Their dealing will make us miss OPEC. There are at least a few books out about their price fixing and general corruption and they are not alone in that.
This is exactly what we get for reducing our universe of widely consumed food from a rainbow of fruits, leaves, nuts, berries, roots, and animals down to four bland cereal grains (and livestock fed with said grains), whose growing process is highly dependent on fossil fuels.
It was rather amusing seeing this in the RSS feed. The title appeared as so:
"Adjust your metaphors. Chicken feed is now ... [Food]"
@dkush21: Simple capitalism isn't "greed" (with the associated connotation of "evil"). It is, in fact, the empirically proven most efficient and viable mechanism for allocation of resources across a society. It is only when the free market is perturbed by government that the resulting imbalance causes problems like this. This is a direct result of the subsidies promoting a process which is so inherently flawed that it produces a NET DEFICIT in fuel (it takes more than a gallon of fuel to product a gallon of ethanol.)
Those old enough to remember the gas rationing lines in the 70's also know they were caused not by the Arab oil embargo of the time, but rather by the price controls put in place by the Carter administration. If price had been allowed to equilibrate, there would have been no lines and rationing would have been handled automatically by the market.
Let this be a lesson to those hoping for "universal health care" or Hillary's "interest rate freeze." The unintended consequences of these simple-minded socialist moves by government would ripple through our society like a wildfire. As it is, we are burning our food supply in a spiral of failure and exacerbating an already fizzling economy brought on in no small part by government's interference in the housing loan market.
And the negative effects of making an inferior product (ethanol) finally begin playing out.