The agricultural states are wildly over-represented in the senate and the electoral college. This is one result. This is baked into the constitution and the senate cannot be changed even by constitutional amendment.
Neither. They want to be left alone to make a living.
So have any of these farmers declined to accept subsidies?
I thought they were also buying soybeans from India.
Still, less gasoline is used by burning ethanol, is it not?
I don’t know. It was never brought up.
But more energy (guess where it comes from) is used to make the ethanol.
Farming could be a bigger piece of the upcoming global environmental disaster than carbon-based energy. There must be some limit to the ongoing expansion of industrialized farming. But as long as there is profit to be had feeding half the planet off 10% of the arable and even some of the non-arable land, greedy businessmen (not farmers) will stay on course.
Probably not. Attempts to actually measure end to end fossil fuel input of producing biofuels, taking into account growing and processing, have found that all biofuels currently produced use more fossil fuel in their production than they actually replace.
Theoretically, biofuel made from algae could be viable, but it’s never been achieved on a meaningful scale.
They are buying soybeans from all over the world. The two main exporters to China though are the US at about 35 million tonnes and Brazil at 50 million tonnes. China imports about 100 million tonnes a year, so roughly 1/2 from Brazil, 1/3 from the US and 1/6 from everywhere else (largely Argentina and Canada.)
India produces about 10 million tonnes a year, but it typically uses almost all of them and in fact has been a net importer the last few years as crop yields had fallen below 8 million tonnes, although this year is supposed to be a large crop which will take them back to 10, but below their peak of 11.
Regardless, China could slurp up every bean that India produces and still be 25 million tonnes short.
Yep, a lot of diesel fuel is burned in the production of ethanol. And then afterwards we call ethanol a “clean” burning fuel.
Heh. I just posted this in another thread:
*Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.*
Nobody is stopping anyone from sustenance farming, and with modern cultivars and methods it would be trivial to produce enough food and raise animals to feed a large family with a good surplus. The reason family farms aren’t competitive is because of the large capital investment and costs of seed for large scale monocropping versus the thin margins that large corporate agribusiness can sustain.
No. Fuel is used to plant, irrigate, fertilize, harvest, transport, and process corn to make ethanol, and the result is energy negative. Even Cuba, which has worked to make biofuel from grain and sugar cane viable following the collapse of the Soviet Union, has found that it is not sustainable. In the US we use E10 and other flexfuel mixtures up to E85 primarily because corn is subsidized and because it provides a modest (and arguable) reduction in exhaust emissions, with the tradeoff being poorer gas mileage (~3% less for E10) because of the lower energy density.
Mass production of hydrocarbon fuel from algae is likely a pipe dream because of the low energy density and amount of processing required to extract oils and synthesize fuel is just not scaleable to replace petrofuel production. Algae could potentially support a future glucose energy economy but that will require some fundamental advances in synthetic biology that nobody knows when will happen. Electric vehicles for OTR haulage and personal transportation are becoming more viable for general transportation needs (although we’ll still need liquid hydrocarbon fuels for niche applications for the foreseeable future) so there may be some demand for biofuels but methanol and methanol-stock synfuels like dimethylether (DME) which can be produced from waste lignocellulistic feedstock are more sustainable, although there are logistical issues in collecting and processing the feedstock.
Stranger
Quite the opposite in fact, for some crops. The program that **ioioio **mentions to pay farmers NOT to grow crops is intended to reduce production and thereby keep prices higher. The theory is that US farmers are productive enough that if they were allowed to grow crops like wheat and corn unfettered, they’d quickly bottom out the commodity prices for those things.
Since commodity prices are a worldwide thing, this would not only hurt American farmers, but also other farmers elsewhere, whose margins are probably smaller to begin with.
Other subsidies are more perplexing- the sugar tariffs (a form of subsidy I suppose) basically outrageously tax imported sugar in favor of domestic sugar. The tariffs mean that the US pays twice, more or less, what the rest of the world does for sugar. What was the market response? Develop high fructose corn syrup and start using that.
Oh, and your notion about no first world agriculture is way off base as well. You’re assuming that labor is the primary cost in agricultural production. This probably isn’t likely to be the case in the first world.
Beyond that, some areas are just *BETTER *at growing certain crops than others, and a lot of those areas are in the first world. Agriculture isn’t “pretty much able to be done anywhere”- nobody’s going to have success growing citrus in Denmark, and similarly, a commercial barley grower in Ghana would have an uphill battle versus Canadian barley growers. All due to growing conditions, not labor costs or anything like that.
Otherwise, a big piece of it is as you say- to ensure domestic production and give leverage in international affairs.
Fuel used to produce something adds to the cost. What is the financial incentive for Shell to add ethanol to their gasoline?
Moderator Note
Let’s try this in Great Debates. Relocated from IMHO.
This is the answer to the OP.
You don’t want your people to starve. There are huge variations in agricultural output, based on the weather, etc. Left entirely up to the free market, farmers would go out of business during the glut years, and the free market can’t react in time during the lean years. People would actually starve. Good luck selling your libertarian free market philosophy when there are grain riots at your front door.
That is the basic motivation behind all the agricultural subsidies the world over. The exact details of their implementation varies by country, hence the differing nature farming in different parts of the world.
One thing to note is that the US and UK had vaguely similar approaches that encouraged industrialization of agriculture (the UK particularly were motivated by nearly starving to death during WW2 during the battle of the Atlantic). The end result is the number of people actually involved in farming goes way down, in the UK this meant the farming lobby became much less powerful. It didn’t in the US as those few people involved in it were concentrated in a few states, so thanks to the vagaries US legislative government, are still very powerful.
Government mandates.
Let us know what you find out.
Fuel adds to the cost, and government subsidies subtract from the cost. The net effect is that e85 costs Shell less than pure gasoline, even though the total cost is more.
On the other hand, you don’t want agriculture regulated purely by market forces, because market forces are slow, especially when applied to agriculture. It takes at least a year for farms to change what they’re growing, so that’s how long it takes for market forces to react. If something happens to drastically decrease the price of soybeans, say, the long-term solution is to grow less soybeans, but in the short term, you don’t want farms going out of business because they can’t pay the bills next month.
One form of subsidy is a guaranteed price: The government says that they’ll buy as many soybeans as you can grow, at $X per ton. If you can get a better price elsewhere (and hopefully you can, since the government price should be lower than the expected market price), go ahead, but if the market bottoms out, you have a safety net.